Any difference in SQ from USB drive storage to NAS playback?

Interesting question.
Though I am no expert, I think there might be a difference.
If I recall correctly, Sam Laufer's The Memory Player outputs files to memory before they are played. The result being higher sound quality.
So, it would seem using either memory, UDB or NAS, will result in differing playback.
Come to think about it, Aurender caches songs to a SSD  before playing music.
I'll put the question to Sam when I speak with him.
Bob

Bob
I have the Aurender N100 and my understanding is it only caches streaming  music to it's SSD?
It maybe my imagination but I swear music played from the nas sound fuller than from a USB hard drive plugged into back of the n100.

I have been using a Melco N1A as my NAS for the last 2+ years now, and it definitely makes for better SQ than when the music I played was stored on a WD My Cloud or Seagate Backup Plus device.
So in my experience, the quality of the storage implementation definitely makes a difference.  Melco, Aurender, Innous, and such are purpose built audiophile devices, equipped with better power supplies and quieter storage mechanisms, all making for a lower noise floor and yielding better SQ, and as expected, you have to pay for the priviledge.

Interesting Jazzman.
That agrees with my hearing but if it's just 0 and 1,s ( lol) how do we hear a difference?

I researched this on my Mac mini and found that the file transfer speeds were significantly faster with the NAS versus the USB drive.
I believe the Aurender N100 only provides USB 2.0 data ports. This provides 480 Mbit/s versus the Gigabit Ethernet port.
You also need to take into account the usb controller chip(s) used by your streamer. On my mac mini there is only one controller chip so it splits time between bringing the data in from USB drive and sending it out to the USB dac. I believe this is why music sounds better from the NAS than USB drive on my system