Devialet AIR working (mostly) on QNAP virtual server...and a few questions

[El_Duderino]

Hi all,

I've been lurking on the forums for some time and figured that I would contribute to a recent relative success story given the ongoing problems with AIR that many people seem to be experiencing.  

I started off with a desire to avoid any laptop/desktop in my music listening area.  I already owned a QNAP Ts-453 PRO and figured that this might serve as a decent music server by utilizing ROON software.  The more recent and powerful QNAP NAS servers have built in virtualization capabilities although performance in my NAS remains modest given the Intel Celeron processor.  I imagine those with fancier Intel i5 or i7 based NAS servers will have no problems at all with performance.  I did enhance the performance of Windows 10 running as a virtual machine by dedicating all 4 processor cores and by upgrading the NAS RAM from 4 GB to 16GB, of which I assigned a full 10GB to the virtual Windows 10 instance.  Music is stored on the NAS server as part of a Linux RAID10 array (this is automatically accessible to the virtual machine which is pretty sweet).

I then installed ROON server (headless) on the Windows 10 virtual machine and made sure to disable auto updates to the OS.  I also disabled Windows defender.  Lastly, I installed Devialet AIR onto the virtual Windows 10 machine (2.1.4beta4).

Using a tablet or my laptop as a ROON remote, I am able to interface with the ROON server which, in all honesty, runs very smoothly.  There are occasionally 0.5-1 second delays in the UI if I'm flipping through music rapidly but, otherwise, it's a fairly seamless experience.  

The NAS is attached through Ethernet to an ASUS RT-56 router, to which I have also attached the Devialet D200 via ethernet.  The ROON server is set to limit sample rate to 96kHz -- more about this later.  The laptop running ROON remote interfaces to the same router through Wi-fi (5 Ghz).

Using this setup, I can play every format recorded at a sample rate equal or less to 96kHz over Devialet AIR Ethernet (keep in mind both the ROON server and Devialet AIR are running on the windows 10 virtual machine).  This includes high resolution FLAC and DSD files (streamed as PCM from ROON).  I have similar results with Devialet AIR Wi-fi although there are occasionally drop outs.  As soon as I up the sample rate to 192 Khz or beyond, the music abruptly stops within about 5 seconds of playback.  When this occurs, I can see that AIR has auto-disabled and I have to manually re-enable it.  Occasionally, before crapping out, the music will become choppy for a few seconds and then stop.  I have only had white noise on one occasion with a high res 192 kHz file.  This lasted for a few seconds and, again, AIR "auto" disconnected.   

I would, ideally, like to be able to extend my high res listening beyond 96 kHz and I would like to stream DSD music natively to the Devialet without downsampling to 96 kHz.  As a test scenario, I installed Devialet AIR directly on to my laptop and connected the laptop to the router with ethernet.  I used ROON to play native files off the laptop.  In this scenario, I WAS able to play all files at all resolutions, including DSD64, without any dropouts.  Given the above, do you think that my setup is limited to 96kHz or below because of lack of processing power in the NAS? Could this all be resolved by substituting a NUC for the virtual machine?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

W