Badpenny

Hi Garth, as I say it really isn't a significant sound difference so I think your approach is good. I have only had good experiences with Synology after trying four others, but I certainly haven't tried a lot. It can be pretty simple to set up if you just need it for copying files around and backing up. The only thing I ever regretted was not getting a bigger one for expandability and further redundancy. Once you have a NAS you will probably find other uses for it. One option to save money is to build a VortexBox with an old PC if you have one lying around. For what you appear to need it might be the cheapest option. If you have the PC, and given the software is a free download, you could get started for the cost of the disks and then transfer them into a Synology, or similar, if you don't like it.

Hi Daudio. Yes, you know it when you hear a bad one. I needed to interface SPDIF to AES once and used a pricey transformer adaptor and that sounded worse than a simple RCA to XLR adaptor I soldered together, which was what first suggested to me that the fixation on impedance matching was not necessarily right.

Ted_b, this is too petty to continue with. Let's get back to the OP's topic.

Thanks to Bob Stern for his post and reference. I find the common insistence on 75 Ohm cables at 1.5m length to be more theoretical than real, and Bob's post points out the weakness of the theoretical argument. In experimenting with digital cable designs I found (at lengths less than 2m) that increasing the space between the conductors seemed to be a good thing up to a point, reducing capacitance but pushing characteristic impedance way above 75 ohm. Different dielectric material (the insulation of the wires) also made a noticeable difference. Don't take this as an attempt to be definitive, the experiments were conducted with as much rigour as we could muster, but the observations are based solely on subjective assessments of sound quality, not jitter measurements (for my money summed jitter level measurement is not very helpful), and differences in digital cables are not easy to detect in short listening bursts.

Hi ted_b. For the record, my Synology NAS does not sound as good as my eSata connected hard drive. When I say people have said the same thing to me, that is what I actually mean. Some of my audio buddies tried a NAS and reported they felt it was marginally worse, suggesting to me my experience probably wasn't down to cables or switches. I never attempted to imply anything more than the words I used and will continue to post things I know to be true, and I reckon that is being careful enough thanks. Your pontifications about one being superior because it must produce less noise interference are speculation. Masquerading logical deductions as fact is something that may require more care don't you think? Nothing in my words suggested we all agree on my opinion here. I am sure that is not true. Feel free to disagree.

Those new high-spec computers tend to sound worse anyway Rod. More high-frequency nasties compared to keeping the computing power low.

I found that playing from NAS didn't sound as good as an external HDD and others have said they found the same thing. The difference is not big but worth considering. So I use the NAS for auto backups and play from local disks.

Hi peedee, I have watched the Antipodes Music Server developments quite closely and wonder if you are referring to the first version with the Jetway board. I got in early too but Mark has since insisted on swapping my board out for another (not Jetway) and the difference was not at all subtle - big improvements in all areas, so I was glad he insisted on me sending it back. But the bigger difference by far was adding their somewhat hefty linear power supply. I recently got to hear their latest version which uses the PCIe card from SOtM and that one sounded very good too. It was only a brief listen but the sound was maybe a little richer than the version I have, which is their current release.