Problems streaming NAS files to Astel and Kern DAP player
Posted by: Bruce Woodhouse on 04 February 2018
Following the death of my iPod I have bought myself a nice treat-a new Astell and Kern AK70 MkII (and incidentally also some Grado 325e 'phones). Very fine sounding components they are too.
I have problems streaming to it from WiFi however.
My system has two NAS. One (Buffalo) holds my PC back up including iTunes etc. The other (Netgear) holds the full resolution music archive (all in FLAC). These files have been variously copied from my old HDX, ripped from CDs with dBpowerAmp or bought as FLAC downloads from Qobuz and 7Digital mostly.
Two problems.
1) I can get my AK to 'see' both NAS on the network but it just won't connect to the NetGear NAS. It shows on the selection list but clicking it fails to connect. It connects perfectly to the Buffalo. Both NAS appear to me to be set up identically-with no passwords or protections. Other WiFi devices (such as laptops etc) connect to both NAS without a hitch and can open and view all files on both.
2) I decided to copy across the FLAC archive to the Buffalo just to experiment and have discovered the AK won't show certain albums on the selection list. It looks to me that these are files purchased from Qobuz and downloaded in FLAC (CD quality or occ High Res). I think downloads from other providers are OK although I've not quite nailed that down. I cannot see any difference between the format of these files so why can I not play them?
I might try saving some of these 'invisible' albums to the inbuilt storage and see if it will play them but I don't have enough storage space in the device (even with 256Gb additional SD card) to do this for my whole archive.
All a bit odd. I cannot see anything in the limited AK setup menu to change that might fix these issues.
Any ideas?
Bruce