The NS1 is a dedicated streamer, it makes no pretense as to being a media server.
It’s a small unpretentious white box with 3 led’s in the front that weighs a quite astonishing for it’s size 10 lbs.
On the back there are a couple of USB ports, one for a wifi adapter and one for external storage, a network socket, and 3 digital outputs, AES, Toslink and EMM’s own proprietary optical connection.
You can either use the smart phone app to stream directly form a file server, or one of the supported streaming services, or just use it as a Roon Endpoint.
In my system it replaced a Pi2AES with a Ifi iPower Elite PSU.
All the following comments apply to this configuration.
Given the cost I was assuming there would be some improvement, but quite honestly I wasn’t expecting the difference to be as big as it was, the Pi2AES is after all a pretty good streamer.
I would liken the impact of the difference to that of upgrading from a BiFrost2 to the Lampizator Amber 3.
It’s all the things you would expect, Blacker background, Improved Stage (focus, deeper, more coherent). I wasn’t really expecting the improvement in bass control, and the overall impact it had on the sound of the Dave.
The Dave is a very good Chord DAC, and as such shares many of the strengths of other Chord DAC’s, it’s very resolving, stages extremely well, but can be a bit on the thin side tonally, the NS1 add’s a degree of richness to the Dave’s presentation, that isn’t there with the Pi2AES or USB for that matter, it makes it a better DAC.
This is similar to my recollection (it’s been a while) of what the Blu2/MScaler brings to the Dave, which I had always thought was the upsamplings doing, but now I have to wonder how much of it was just cleaning up the input.
Short version of this is streamers matter, as little sense as it makes on first blush, they can have as big an impact on the sound of the system as upgrading the DAC. I’m not going to even guess as to why that would be.