Currently have roon core on my qnap 471. This is connected to my router which goes to my ps audio dac with bridge via generic cat5 cable. The cable run is about 35 feet long. I use my macbook pro or my iphone to control roon via wifi.
My question is will I increase sound quality if I move my qnap close enough to my dac (other side of the wall the dac is on so I wont here the qnap) run the cat 5 from my router into the qnap and then run a high quality audiophile ethernet cable from the qnap to the dac?
I am assuming this will allow me to control roon using my mac or phone.
Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Unless your Cat5 cables are 100 meters long then ‘no’, it does not matter where your NAS is in your home nor the quality of the cables. In general, all the file that is on your NAS are going to be transferred perfectly, every time, to your DAC regardless how far it has to travel. The limiting factor of any NAS is the speed that the file can read and write to and from the disk drives.
The network stuff you should care about is that all of the pins in your Ethernet cables are functional (that there are no broken wires inside the cables). After that, you want to make sure that the cables you are using are high-enough quality for your routers, switches, NAS, etc. These days most things have 1000Base-T connections which are (Gigabyte), so you’ll want to have Cat5e wires or higher to take the most advantage of your network hardware. It’s just important to know that Cat5e cables on a Gigabyte network, are just going to improve the capacity of the network, not the playback quality.
It’s best to have your NAS tucked away someplace where it’s dry and cool so that the disks drives last as long as possible.
Thanks for the info.
Just trying to squeeze every bit of quality out of it that I can. Not quite up to my vinyl sound but getting there.
Sure thing. Are you running RoonCore on the QNAP? The QNAP 471 has 4 ethernet ports so it can move an insane amount of data. If you think about the numbers, a theoretical perfect Gigabyte network can transfer a complete audio CD as an uncompressed WAV (700-800 MB) in under 1 second. A NAS like that is intended to shine when you are moving 4000K video files, which are going to be Gigs of data.
Music files size is sort of a joke compared to high-quality video files. One of the first feature length 4K videos is 160Gigs of data. 
If you want to squeeze more quality, get a better DAC and avoid compressed MP3 files. Also check out the upsampling options.