Sound quality differences between NAS units

[ac16161]

I know I said I would sign off from this debate, but today I did a quick test with my wife as the listening subject. She could not care less about servers, file formats, transcoding etc. She does not even really know what a server is. She only wants the hi-fi to work. I played her the same Diana Krall track twice, once from the Synology, and once from the WD MyBook, both via Minimserver, and asked her whether she felt the track sounded the same each time. She said that they were not at all the same, and that on one version the vocal had a really harsh quality to it that was not present on the other version. The harsh version was the Synology. Yet in both cases the same 24/96 AIFF file was being streamed to a Linn Akurate DS/2 via a fully wired network. I'm convinced there is more to streaming SQ than we presently understand. In the ideal world, streamer manufacturers would build streamers to be essentially immune to choice of NAS, but at the moment, that does not seem to be the case.