Getting an NAS to deliver best sound

[davide256]

Hi brucew,

 

The noise spit back into the AC from the NAS is considerable. I would not recommend having any computer on the same AC drop as your DAC, Pre, Power amps. You can stick a power conditioner, balanced power, or even lpsu on to lower this noise. I have also had good results with optical LAN to isolate further; cheap, easy and effective.

 

+1

[brucew]

I moved the NAS to a different floor and connected using a couple inexpensive AC750 routers set up as Bridge-to-AP. That was implemented without any technical glitches. The resulting SQ was better than when the NAS shared the same circuit as the HiFi, but still not as good as just using my USB HDD drive.

 

I did a bit of experimenting and found that:

 

• The AC750 Access Point running 5GHz (AC) and 2.4GHz (N) modes together, in the same room and circuit as the sound system, was causing some SQ degradation even when the sound system was not receiving music files through them.
  
• The degradation went away when I disabled Wifi, so it may be the radiated RFI, not the switched power supply, unless running the AP with WiFi enabled was injecting more noise back into the mains lines.
  
• When I turned off 2.4GHz, the SQ degradation caused by the WiFi reduced significantly but there was still some degrdation. In reading about the difference between 802.11n and ac, it seems that ac-class behaves in a more directional pattern with the other Wifi devices, while n-class radiates in a more omni-directional field. This could be why it has a greater effect on SQ than when in ac-mode only.
  

 

I still had slightly lower SQ using the NAS with wireless bridge than when using a USB HDD. So while contemplating that, I did a bit of reading and decided to make the jump from Windows7 to Windows10. I found that after implementing edbk's configurations AND still using Fidelizer 7.3, I was able to compensate enough for the wireless NAS setup to get my SQ to a slightly better level than before I started any of this.