Do I know definitively? No. I’m just sleuthing to see what data paths changed.
The workload is higher for NAS, but very slightly so. The workload would be MUCH higher during audio analysis, metadata updates, etc, so I don’t think this is it.
Related to the audio data, yes. But the SMB server on the NAS might be flinging traffic in a broadcast/multicast/discovery manner that the Bryston has to deal with. The switch/hub might be flooding the wrong ports with data so the Bryston is also seeing the SMB traffic. Etc, etc… there are lots of things that could be wrong.
The ideas mentioned above are digital data mechanisms, and they are not very likely in a modern network – but bad setups do exist out there.
There is also the idea (which I can not defend or explain well) that says that electrical noise can screw up power signals that drive the analog processes in the digital to analog conversion.
I speak a bit about these ideas here and just a couple of posts after that one.
Depends on what you think is happening… it’s all possible I guess, at this level of optimization.