Minim server + Synology NAS kills custom dedicated pc on music sound quality

[tboooe]

(07-01-2016 18:58)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for posting this. A couple of questions:

Were you using any transcoding settings in either case? For example, many people have found that transcoding FLAC to WAV24 improves the sound.

What renderer were you using when playing from the QNAP? Was it JplayStreamer runnng on the PC? If so, it isn't really "fair" to compare playing from a remote server with playing from a local server running on the same machine as the renderer. The former is doing network I/O to stream the audio and the latter isn't.

Yes, I set up Minimserver on the NAS and PC as similarly as possible, aside from the convout feature in stream.options that I could not get working due to the TS-131 using an ARM processor. Both instances of Minimserver transcode FLAC to wav24.

The renderer was indeed Jplaystreamer. I totally agree that this was not a fair comparison for the reasons you pointed out as well as the fact that my PC is pretty optimized. However, I really wanted to test if running Minimserver on a NAS would allow me to relieve some the CPU duties (albeit low) from my PC. Since my music files are on another NAS upstairs and received wirelessly to my PC, library scanning is also very slow. I was hoping I could have a music only NAS set up in my music room running on the "local" network with Minimserver running all the time. I still may use the TS-131 to store my music files and continue to have Minimserver run on the PC.

Overall, this was a relatively cheap experiment for me. I like having the ability to have Minimserver on my NAS as a backup source though.