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Hey man, thanks again for your posts. I knew this was going to be a rabbit hole, and i’m fully in it now so may as well see it through!
So, about this part:
You can get a Gigbyte Brix with optical and analogue out with 512Gb SSD which will kick seven shades out of a cheapo NAS and Sonos Connect
In what sense will it be superior? It’s a genuine question: I don’t want the source in my Hifi to be compromised. I’m guessing processing power, which translates to streaming capability? A consideration with high demand applications e.g. video, multiple users etc?
Edit: my late night baby-cradling Internet trawling also indicates that increased ability to buffer audio is beneficial to sound quality.
Olly398-
Welcome to the rabbit hole that is digital streaming.
Ok the short answer as to why a NUC is better than a NAS in your circumstances is simply (a) raw compute power and (b) data access time. With a large library of audio files on a budget NAS you will be looking at 30 seconds or more to return a list of directory contents, and the little cpu will struggle so you'll get constant dropouts. This is not about sound quality but its actual ability to read a file, encode it and push the data to the network interface fast enough. Remember, higher quality = far more data to process. A cheap NAS will be so slow as to be unuseable, even for one user on a fast network. I know, I've tried and failed miserably.
The other issue is to do with the quality of your DAC and how it is introduced to the signal path. People generally get hung up on resolution and conversion bitrate (e.g. 24bit / 96Khz is generally accepted as plenty good enough), but IMO what is equally important and often overlooked are the Total Harmonic Distortion, the Dynamic Range and Jitter.
These first two are not new to audioheads coming from the analogue world but seem to go out of the window when considering consumer-level digital equipment. (for the sake of completeness: THD+N is the noise introduced to the signal path, so less is better. Dynamic range is the ability to deliver signal amplitude; more DR is better so that detail is not lost in quiet sections of your music). Jitter is roughly to do with the timing of data sent to the DAC and its ability to resequence the packets before conversion.
Consumer electronics manufacturers rarely publish these specs for their devices. On the other hand, the specs for a DAC connected to a NUC via USB (or even optical) like the ones mentioned are published and significantly better with regard to sound quality.
I guess what I'm saying is that for sound quality, especially on a budget, you have to flip your thinking a bit; try to invest most of your budget into a decent DAC and then figure out the cheapest, most effective way to cleanly deliver a digital file to it. UI is important but it can come later. If you lock yourself into a proprietary, relatively lo-fi solution it will be difficult to break out later.
That said, there is a perfectly good place for Sonos, chromecasts etc. which is to use them only as streamers of digital data and have a separate DAC connected to their optical out ports, which is what I do in my bedrooms and study. But I already had a decent NAS and even then for my main hi-fi setup I run a NUC + DAC instead.
freddo
Ok. There are plenty of other hifi streamers available that support airplay 2 but it seems like you’ve discounted this in favour of a NAS. So I would be looking at any cheap DLNA client, lots on amazon for little money
Edit: i still think a NAS is overkill for what you’re doing. Better to get a little Yamaha streamer and put a usb stick in the back of it, or if you really want multiroom then build a NUC (or a Mac mini) and run plex Media Server with chromecasts in the other rooms. Much more reliable and better SQ. You can get a Gigbyte Brix with optical and analogue out with 512Gb SSD which will kick seven shades out of a cheapo NAS and Sonos Connect. Both of these solutions are within your budget. If you go with the NUC you won't spend more than £250 all in.