Do I have to use a streamer/renderer to play music from an NAS?

@ kumakahn.  Again, thank you. Many ways to get there. I didn’t know about the Zen Mini. I like the specs for it. It seems to match the RC-1590 better than the Vault II. The Zen Mini can handle DSD, as does the RC-1590.

Have you made a buying decision?  

Audioengr wrote:"Most of what makes digital sound good has to with low jitter, and I mean really, really low jitter, a few picoseconds. It's ALL ABOUT JITTER, period."
I never say never or always, but i pretty much agree here. If you think about reproduction, each sample requries two points, plus smoothing/filtering.  We have spent 35 years focusing on ONE point, voltage (bit depth) and pretty much ignored the other (timing).  Over ten years ago i added a PLL (or two) to my cheap-o transport ( A CD player) and made a large leap forward.
Remember that jitter has many fathers too - noise, threshold detection, blah, blah, blah.  I know nothing about Steve's stuff, but it certainly seems to have the right design objectives in mind.  I have also had very good results with a relatively cheap Schiit EITR (USB - SPDIF).
G

As I recently went down this road I'll share a bit of how I approached it. First, I use a mesh wifi system which made this possible without re-wiring my house. Second, before going all-in and buying something from Synology or QNAP, I set up an old Mac mini (2010) as a NAS running Asset UPnP. Music files are in WAV format. I settled on the mconnect app for control. A Sonore microRendu provides rendering duties and feeds a Bel Canto mLink USB-SPDIF converter (I prefer the BNC connection of my DAC). The sound quality is superb, as is the convenience. I will likely purchase a "proper" NAS some time in the near future but there's little need right now.

BTW, the microRendu replaced a Bluesound Node 2, which replaced a well-appointed Mac mini (2012) running Amarra Luxe, A+, and HQPlayer.

As I noted in an earlier post:

I was under the impression that jitter was handled by “modern” DACs or by using an external master clock.

I'm really trying to understand "jitter" and it's impact on streamed music.  I use the following components for streaming:

NAD M12 preamplifier/DAC w/BluOS MDC (I don't use it's DAC)
NAD M22 v2 power amplifier
sonicTransporter i7 for Roon DSP (no storage)
Innuos Zenith MKII media server
Mytek Liberty DAC

My Roon setup is Wireworld Cat7 Ethernet from a wall jack to a 5-port switch

• sonicTransporter and Zenith are plugged into the switch using Wireworld cables
• Zenith is plugged into DAC using a Wireworld USB cable
• DAC is plugged into a NAD using Cardas RCA cables

I could use Ethernet from the Zenith to the M12, eliminating the USB cable.  I like the Mytek DAC better than the M12 DAC, and the Mytek DAC allows me to play native DSD files.

To me and my friends, the SQ is excellent.  In my system, native DSD sounds best; MQA second; and Zenith FLAC files upsampled to DSD 128 last.

If I have a jitter problem, I cannot hear it.  So my question is, how can you tell?

to oldschool1948

Steve has more bench experience with these so I wont even comment on his figures or claims. But I’ll provide a couple of data points that are useful to anyone trying to digest why jitter is worse in A than B.

First, SPDIF and its variants (including AES/EBU and toslink, which are merely physical layer manifestations) have the DAC as the SLAVE to the MASTER clock in the sending device (transport, CD player, adapter, streamer, whatever).

USB and Ethernet are asynchronous. the sender sends bits to a buffer until told to hold on... and the DAC clocks things out on its own, using whatever clock circuitry it has.

Beyond clock specs, we have to deal with detection of that clock, which might be on the lead (cab;e) on the internal bus, whatever. Lead lengths may vary, thresholds for detecting a clock pulse may vary, noise may interfere -- many functions can interfere with timing by small (to us) but large (to the music) amounts. Remember that the entire sample time slot for a 44k signal is 20 mSec (1/44000 sec) - yea simplified for illustration.

I suspect noise is a significant contributor since linear power supplies seem to improve sources in subjective testing and we KNOW (due to error correction) when there are errors and that the base clock was the same. I conclude that this ids also why the same signal over AES is reported to sound better than over Coax. We KNOW that optical toslink has a big jitter component, but the advantage of ground isolation (due to, well, no ground)

G