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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.
With my #fanboi hat on: this is mitigated in a Sonos style solution that indexes the drive over night and has its own library of music with direct pointers to file locations. No need to wait for the NAS to enumerate directory listings across the network at playback time.
Also, I totally agree about the DAC comment, as you know. It was a significant upgrade for me when I switched to using the digital out of my Sonos Connect into a Cyrus DAC XP preamp an DAC combo. Good upgrade path available when using a streamer that has such a digital out.
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mashton
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.