Sound quality: internal hard drive vs NAS with XXHighend

[Suteetat]

I recently installed SSD hard drive my my C: drive with Win7 and XXHigh end.
In the past, I have my music library installed in my 2nd internal hard drive in flac format. Recently I bought a larger
1.5TB RAID-1 NAS so I converted all my flac file to AIFF using dBPoweramp converter for my NAS. (I used
to use smaller NAS to back up in flac so my 2nd computer can use it as music library with mediamonkey for my
iPod/iPhone sync but MM lately is misbehaving so I want to use iTune instead for iPhone/iPod thus AIFF).
Anyhow, I thought that at the very least, AIFF/NAS should sound the same as Flac in my internal hard drive, perhaps
a bit better. To my surprise, I found Flac in my internal hard drive sounds better.
I understand that XXHighend writes flac  to its folder (on SSD) first as WAV before playing. I assume that it
would do the same thing with AIFF. I did select the option to write to XXHighend drive first to make sure that
SSD would not be a factor for the comparison.
Any idea why this might be the case?   

[bhobba]

Scratching my head on that one.  All I can think of is maybe AIFF doesn't get the treatment of writing to SSD first.  But aside from that it has me beat.

I know some people say due to the extra decode time AIFF or WAV is slightly better but the way XX works by decoding it before playing it should make zero difference and I would store them as Flac.  With high res recordings increasingly coming on line even the large amount of storage you have could easily be filled up in no time.  I have recently done a post about perhaps having support for TAK which is a more efficient lossless format than flac for that very reason - to eek out as much as possible from our storage - especially for high res recordings.   

Thanks
Bill

[PeterSt]

Hi Suteetat,

Let me first tell you that from your post I can't derive anything that would show you don't understand what you are doing. The contrary. For me this implies that you have made serious work of this and your judgements will definitely be correct.

But I don't have a (real) clue to how this can be possible ...


Indeed both FLAC and AIFF will be written to the SSD first (with or without that checkbox) and from there on things should be the same.
The process of both conversions is completely different, and will have a different load on the system's resources and memory, and since everything matters, this may matter too. I know, this is a very weak explanation, but I don't know of any better at the moment.

Of course we must assume that the conversion from FLAC to AIFF went OK.
Similarly we must assume that my conversion from AIFF to WAV is OK, FLAC to WAV the same.
If you are really into this, you could grab both WAV results at the moment the file is playing (you can stop playback, but don't quit XXHighEnd), store them next to eachother in one of your music folders, and play them from there. If the difference has gone, it should be the earlier thing I said.

Notice that you always play Attended (I think) which is not the best thing in the first place (sound quality is out of my control then). Which could be turned into : if you don't mind that (difference) very much, why bother about a possible difference as in the case of this topic ?
But then of course, we just want to *know*. Me too. But in any case, don't forget this please.

Let me know if you find something new. Or if you think you found something new ...

Peter

[Telstar]

How is the NAS connected? Ethernet, firewire or usb?

[Suteetat]

My NAS is connected via ethernet.
However I think the issue is not AIFF is inferior to FLAC. I copied AIFF track from my NAS to my internal HD (not C: drive SSD, the regular SATA HD).
The track I used is Variation 1 from Bach Goldberg Variation with Perahia. On internal HD, AIFF file has more weight, slightly more body than FLAC.
Both AIFF and FLAC from internal HD has more open top than AIFF track played from NAS.

AIFF may sound a bit better than FLAC because of less processing and less resource utility as Peter mentioned. However, I am not sure how to explain internal HD is better than NAS via ethernet. I wonder if anyone else has a chance to compare and if the conclusion is the same. Unfortunately I won't have more time to try this for awhile as my new DAC is not going to be here for another 1-2 weeks and I did too good a job of getting rid of my DAC a tad too soon so I will be without my digital playback for a little while from tomorrow onward

[PeterSt]

However, I am not sure how to explain internal HD is better than NAS via ethernet

About that one, you may try Resource Monitor (can be started from within TaskManager) and look at your network activity;
It may well be that *after* the track plays you keep on seeing activity which is not there when playing from the internal hdd.
Be sure to have your "Split File at size" parameter not too low, because otherwise you may run in disk/network activity again before you are able to see when the network activity comes to rest. With Quad Upsampling 120(MB) is sufficient to last for a minute or so. With less upsampling, more.

[KUOYAO]

Hi guys,

I also recently transfered by music library to a NAS (Synology DS410).  My first try at placing my music in a NAS was to a Synology 209J which was quite problematic.  The issue turned out to be slow transfer speed.  When I used the DS410, all those problems disappears.

Could it be possible that the difference in sound quality you experienced is due to your computer still processing read/write from NAS while playing music at the same time?