Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - Jim F. - Computer Audio Asylum

Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive?

In Reply to: Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? posted by Tweekeng on January 14, 2007 at 09:20:53:

> Only from the dropouts that always occor when using wireless.
Yes, that's the big "gotcha" with **all** computer audio. Audio **demands** real-time precision, and PC subsystems (whether PCI buses or network attached drives) are simply not designed with this as a priority. This can result in ridiculous situations such as a 2 GHz PC simply not being able to play glitch-free audio while a different 1 GHz PC has flawless playback (because of differences in support chipsets, or whatever).
802.11g is no guarantee of perfect playback, no matter how many channels of 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio its bandwidth should support **in theory** (and however much buffering there is).
Networks can spring nasty surprises on you. When I dipped into wireless media players a few years ago (via the cd3o player) I had the bright idea of using a "spare" Windows 98 PC as a fileserver (the cd3o Music Server software required Windows XP). I never got this to work -- rumor has it that filesharing was badly broken between Windows 98 and Windows XP, but I never found out for sure. It wouldn't even work when I bypassed the cd3o's internal 802.11b receiver and hard-wired it to an external 802.11g bridge (linking to the Music Server PC via a Netgear 802.11g router, which was getting its WAV files from the Windows 98 fileserver via another 802.11g bridge connecting to the network through the same Netgear router).
You may luck out with your particular brand of network-attached storage. Or you may strike out. But you can be sure the manufacturer of the NAS system did **not** design it with audio in mind!

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

The Cable Cooker

Follow Ups Full Thread

Topic - Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - orpheus 13:51:08 01/13/07 (9)

Thanks for your input, you have emboldened me to give it a shot. (nt) - orpheus 23:57:33 01/28/07 (0)

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - Tweekeng 09:20:53 01/14/07 (6)

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - Jim F. 09:04:36 01/19/07 (0)

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - bigsid 22:36:45 01/14/07 (1)

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - kjg 09:16:11 01/15/07 (0)

you guys missed the point - Tweekeng 15:26:50 01/14/07 (0)

You are forgetting the use of buffers that gets around this. - clifff 13:40:03 01/14/07 (0)

'.......dropouts that always occor when using wireless.' - Crimson 11:57:50 01/14/07 (0)

No [nt] - J.Mac 21:12:07 01/13/07 (0)

Follow Ups

Re: Any quality loss if you use a network attached drive? - Jim F. 09:04:36 01/19/07 (0)

You can not post to an archived thread.