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Hi all, my first post so bear with me on this :)

So I have a sonos play 1 (x3), playbar and sub in my living room. My music is a mixture of streamed content but also some albums i have ripped in to mp3 or Flac/WAV on my Nas Drive.

What I am trying to work out is how I can enhance my music fidelity further. Specifically with the source content I want something that can host my content (USB drive), stream and have a higher quality DAC.

My NAS is just too noisy to remain on all the time….

Furthermore I am thinking of adding some more speakers down the road but these may or may not be Sonos specific. It would be great if there was something that had a screen too.

 

I was thinking of a Nanomesher DAC 2 (pi based) but also others.

 

I also have a Fiio M6 and was wondering if there was a way to bridge that or have it appear as a sonos target to use to stream from.

 

sorry guys a bit of a ramble there, just exploring options.

 

cheers!

Regarding the audio quality, I don’t think there is anything you can add to the system to improve audio quality.  Looking at the M6 for example, there is no way to transfer music from  the M6 to Sonos  digitally, it would only be through a Sonos device that can take analog aux input. Could be wrong about that  though, so don’t take my word for it.

 

As far as the NAS sound issue, the obvious answer is to move the NAS to a location where noise isn’t an issue, but assume that’s not an issue.  Not sure if using an SSD drive with your NAS would work either if the fan would still come on.

 

I have a similar issue in that I don’t currently have a NAS and am considering getting one just for Sonos.  I don’t need more than what could be held on a thumbdrive and don’t want to buy a full NAS for this reason.  There are routers that have a USB port for thumbdrives that would work well, but I don’t have that and don’t wish to replace my routers.  Perhaps a travel router would work, something like this.  I don’t think so though as it appears that you’d have to be on the travel routers own WiFi to access files from an attached thumb drive and only then through a browser.  It does mention DLNA though, but again, doesn’t seem to be usable as a cheap NAS device only.

There is no reason to run your Sonos music library on a fancy NAS, Sonos’ NAS needs are both minimal and antique and meeting them will render your nice NAS a lot less secure.

An inexpensive NAS like some of the WD, Ethernet connected ones or the bottom end of other maker’s lines are decent options but beware of short supported lifetimes.

My solution was a Raspberry Pi (about $65 for a full kit) Note: a Pi 3 works as well or better.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TTPK42Z/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title

a piggyback M.2 carrier ($30)

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NH2W8NL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title

An M.2 drive ($50 = 250 GB or $99 = 1 TB)

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B073SBV3XX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title

A couple tweaks and it is working: Live Journal

 

The critical, must have, can’t avoid feature is support for SMB v1.

Thanks Stan - i have a pi3 laying around so may do the disk mod or just plug in a spare external USB drive and share via linux the SMB mount. Now the question is going to be comparing the likes of a youtube tune to the same tune that is shared via local SMB in flac format….

 

on to testing we go, the next thing I want to work out is the quality of the DAC in the sonos speakers/software using my phone as the controller.

I did a very simple A-B test with my FLAC files compared to my CD player and couldn’t hear any difference. Same for serving up the files from a variety of servers, as long as the server doesn’t sleep too long and cause errors all worked identically to my ears.

Nice. I just realized I had a small x86 pc hanging out of the tv HDMI port with a small mico-SD card slot. I just installed Samba and can see the files via sonos - so that's the file hosting problem sorted (no need for my big NAS to be on all the time now).

 

Now the question is on quality. What I want to work out is the quality of the Sonos DAC vs. some external DAC to do the decoding.

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