Installing Audirvāna Core Player
Contents
On a Synology NAS
You need to install the package on a Synology NAS manually. The Synology package is a download from the Audirvāna website, available after logging in. Figure out beforehand which package you need: for Intel or ARM CPU’s. Follow the instruction found on the Audirvāna Community forum.
There are a few things that are crucial to know:
- From experience, we recommend a NAS with at least 4Gb of RAM. On older Synology devices with 2Gb, the NAS crashes if you want to play local files from the NAS next to streaming services. Audirvāna itself says it does work on modern devices with 2Gb, but it is unknown from which year on.
- As a result, a reasonably recent NAS is recommended. Not just for stability, but also because of the processor power, disk speed and thus responsiveness of the remote app.
From the limited listening test with just Qobuz or Tidal, it all sounded above expectations, but the DS418’s lack of horsepower made operating the app frustrating. Test it on your more powerful Synology than my DS418 though, Audirvāna Core Player is not difficult to install and as a solution it is elegant and very effective.
We do not have a QNAP, so we were unable to test this.
Installing on Linux
Installation on Linux is easy if you can work with command line. Follow the instruction found on the Audirvāna Community forum.
Once Audirvāna Core Player is installed, updates are distributed through Apt for Debian-based distributions or Yum for the Linux distributions using RPM.
There are a few things to keep in mind: Audirvāna Core Player uses Avahi daemon, the Linux implementation of the ‘Bonjour’ service. With standard Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi Desktop, Linux Mint or other distributions, this Avahi daemon is installed and started by default, but with minimal installations you need to install it yourself.
After Core Player is installed navigate to the folder ‘/opt/audirvana/studio‘, when using studio, and use the SetAsService shell script. See the screenshot.
The command is ‘sudo ./setAsService.sh enable username‘. If you do not specify a username, an audirvana user is created under which the service runs. Please note that if you create a network share, the audirvana user must also have read permissions on that share. A user that you create yourself and whose rights you assign makes it easier.
After you have done this, you can use ‘sudo ./SetAsService.sh start‘ to start the service. If you want this Audirvāna service to start automatically with a boot, you need to add the Audirvāna service to the boot file. See the manual of the distribution you are using on how to achieve this.
Interesting question. From my own experience, I cannot add a very good power supply to my DAC which has a streamer built-in and connected to the DAC via I2S. So I bought a very good power supply for my Roon Nucleus, which is sort of a NAS or computer. That helps but not to a great extent. It is physically connected to a switch and from that switch to my streamer/DAC. What did help to a great extent, was the addition of a passive ethernet filter. I think, even without the Nucleus, I would still have to connect my streamer/DAC to the internet so filtering would still be beneficial. Adding a really good streamer with good outboard power supply like you mention would be the best solution IMO.
My own experience is that you can achieve an even lower digital domain noise floor if there is no computer/NAS physically connected in the signal path, even if it is connected earlier on the network, behind a switch.
Would you agree that for ultimate sound quality, which many are probably looking for, you are better off by concentrating on a really really low digital noise floor using a good Streamer (only) with very good power supply and fed with an VERY clean ethernet signal?
I have a feeling that as long as you have a computer or NAS physically connected to a switch/router/DAC you will (in general) have a lot more noise to fight than if removing the computer/NAS completely.
It very much depends on the implementation of the USB input on DAC side and the quality of the powersupplies on the motherboard of the streamer or PC. Most streamers are based on (industrial) Small Board Computer components, like Raspberry Pi.
It ain’t that black and white, but in general the Audio manufacturers are more aware of these issues and design their streamers accordingly.