WiFi much faster than cable

Sure it should be faster.

You have to sort your network out:

The switch, the cables (even AQ can break)...router settings.

The cables are new, not sure what settings can be tweaked on the Sky router.

Could it be down to the processer? The one on the iMac is much faster than the one on the NAS?

Yes, it comes down to good old simple processing power. The iMac will be hitting the numbers far quicker than the nas.

I have a dell poweredge server, 8 cores, lots of ram etc running plex server, giving all clients instant access. I did run it on a smaller server and it was noticably slower.

Well it could be quite simple really. Your Ethernet cabled connection will be either 10, 100 or 1000 Mbps. This will usually be duplex, ie this speed in both directions, allowing complex transfers.

Your  wifi connection using older legacy standards may typically struggle to achieve a better performance than a 10 Mbps wired connection. however if you are using the new wifi standard 802.11ac then you might be able to get up to  about 1300Mbps one way if a short distance to your wifi router. So if you are transferring simple files over a short distance on 'ac' with little or no other traffic or contention  of your wifi spectrum, then you may get a significantly better speed than 100Mbps and even better than 1000Mps. With more complex transfers, busier wifi networks and longer distances you should see the wired connection outperform wifi, certainly at 1000Mbps and usually at 100Mbps. However it's worth noting Naim does not yet support 802.11ac

Simon

Could also be the hub. No expierience with Sky but BT and Relish hubs can be awful going wireless to wired. I now run a Linksys switch and router home side of the ISPs router and all is good.

Thank you all.

Considering the processor speed of the NAS is a Marvell 1.2 GHz, with 256 RAM. The iMac is 2.5GHz Intel core i5, with 4GB RAM, may well have something to do with it. 

I appreciate that it's be discussed a billion times before on the forum, but because access to the music is faster, doesn't necessarily mean the SQ is better, or even the same as wired...or does it?

It is occurring to me, that perhaps it may be better to Ethernet the iMac and get it's full potential, and just use the NAS for back up duties...any thoughts?

Davina

Moving from WiFi to wired most definitely improved SQ for me. My Unitiserve was connected to an Airport Extreme, then WiFi to an Airport Express by the streamer. Putting the US on my rack and connecting it via a switch was something I did mainly to try to improve stability, but the SQ improvement was significant. In my case, though, I wasn't getting better speeds over WiFi, although it was good enough to stream 24/192. 

I think you hit the point there, Looking up something on an index with a 2.5GHz i5 is going to be quicker than looking it up with a 1.2GHz Marvell.

They'll both stream the music to the ND5 XS at 100Mbps though, as the ND5 XS only supports 100BaseT