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

It would certainly help to know the difference between MHz and Mbits/sec. 😁

Bits per second for cd resolution audio versus USB is what matters. 

Mapman.
Thanks for being open minded!

That also sounds very plausible too.
Could very well explain why to my ears played from the nas has more body and dynamic than from an attached USB HDD or even USB flash drive.

I am always receptive to trying it out but sometimes also interested in just why something would act as it appears to.

Are the media files the same  Flac or Wav on both the NAS and USB drive? Is the drive a small 2.5 device that is being powered by USB or does it have it's own power supply? I actually have a similar problem using my Node2i. Streaming from Tidal sounds a little better to me than streaming from my hard drive attached to my router by USB. I can't imagine the N100 has a poor USB implementation I imagine it has noise reduction galvanic isolation.

Djones if the streamer is accessing files on a remote device directly via a network file share, the file share protocol may be a bottleneck that could limit bandwidth. Better to run music server software on the device hosting the files and allow streamers
to connect to to music server as clients.