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

[simoncn]

(13-11-2013 01:59)sleask Wrote:  I just have to share this story with everyone on this forum as well, my original story is over on PS audio’s forums at http://www.psaudio.com/forum/#/discussio...nful-story
if you don’t want to read the long version, here is the short one;
I spent a lot of time and money testing and building a dedicated music pc, I have always wanted to try minim server and I had an extra synology nas, the ds213+ with 1 wd 3tb red so here was my chance, reset the synology, reinstalled dsm (complete steps at bottom of post),installed minim server, the result was quite surprising, it didn’t sound as the pc but darn close, I thought the pc has ssd’s in it so let’s try one in the synology. OMG it killed the pc, just to make sure I wasn’t totally insane, I invited a fellow audio friend over to confirm the differences, he was blown away.
So if you’re using your NAS as music server only, feeding a network renderer, I highly recommend you try this!
Setup:
Remove hhd installed one ssd, complete unit reset(holding down reset button twice), reinstall DSM, check for updates, set up ssd-synology hybrid raid(no data protection), installed synology’s media server just to get all the systems default shared folders set up, added user and set permissions for the folders, stopped the media server, installed java, installed minim server, installed minim watch on pc, open minim watch and set transcode to “wav24”. Transfer music files, stop windows and mac file services, enjoy!
I noticed some people were having cpu usage problems with 24/192 flac
The DS213+ has the dual core PPb 1.067 GHz chip and here are the systems cpu usage specs transcoding FLAC to wav24 with this set up,
16/44 – 3-4 %
24/96 – 7-12 %
24/192 – 11-17 %

Wattage used by each unit
DS213+ 9w
PC 76 -81+w

Simon, thank you so much for your work and software, you real have taken my system to a new level
Cheers
Steve

Thanks for sharing this!

I'm impressed that the DS213+ can do FLAC to wav24 transcoding with only 17% CPU usage as well as consuming only 9W. The PowerPC processor used in this model is an unusual choice (Intel and ARM are much more common). From this evidence, it has a lot going for it.