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  • Impulses - Sunday, January 12, 2014 - link

    Is there a reason audiophiles sit closer to their oh so noisy NAS than the rest of us? Do 192khz/24-bit files sound so much sweeter if you're no more than 5 ft from the electrons of the media holding them? I mean, are they putting SSD into these things to top it all off? That'd be the ultimate overkill, SSD for streaming audio...

    I'll stick to the Chromecast in the living room and sadly I'll have to bear the barely there hum of my idle desktop over my Beyer headphones when music's playing at my desk. In all seriousness, I could kinda see the point of a passively cooled unit in Japan, tiny housing arrangements and all... Seems kinda ridiculous elsewhere unless you live in a shoebox in NYC or you're putting it in a studio. Guess that could be one niche market.
  • fteoath64 - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link

    " Do 192khz/24-bit files sound so much sweeter if you're no more than 5 ft from the electrons". Yes they DO!. Using a tube amp and even mid-end audiophile speakers, the difference is astonishing for people with good ears (not many have them). It can only be appreciated by people who loved audio and have the ears to detect the subtle changes in color and warmth of the music. It is like a tube amp sounds really good after an hour when it is completely warmed up.
  • krotchy - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link

    Comments like this make me wish more people understood electronics at some level. You have made two completely differing statements in your comparison that is just plain wrong.

    First, Tube Amps sound differently after they have warmed up, and guess what, if you run the signal through a digitizer and perform an FFT, you can tell the difference between a cold and warm Tube Amp.

    However as Impulses mentioned, a digital signal must be buffered before being output. This is a simple fact of any serial protocol. Reducing jitter on the digital signal makes 0 difference, as it will be clocked out of the A/D using the clock associated with the signal processing device not the clock of the NAS. The digital signal just has to come in without dropping packets, which is really easy to do in most systems, even marginally designed systems. You take the signal coming out of this NAS compared to any other source device and I 100% guarantee you that you cannot tell the difference between the two signals once you digitize it and take an FFT.

    You may think your ears are good, but I assure you my DSP Engineer is better.
  • chaos215bar2 - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link

    You missed the /s.

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