Yep, been at it a while. When 21 in mid 60’s, I enlisted in USAF and got great training as an electronic tech and stayed in over six years, when I got serious about my college degree and took advantage of GI Bill. Got degree in Business/Marketing and worked in marketing for a book publisher for 30 years until my vision got so bad, could not drive like I used to. and been retired for over 12 years, so have lots of time to tinker with today’s electronic gadgets. Probably bought the first Roku when it came out and have a couple running today. Have the Fire TV, Chromecast, too, but the WDTV is the family work horse for movie viewing. All these gadgets are different enough so that each has some advantage over the other. We still keep cable TV; too attached to some programs like live baseball, football, 60 Minutes, and wife has her favorite sitcoms. The best thing about cable other than the programming is today, it is portable, because we can also watch most programs via our iPads at home or when we travel; like when in Hawaii this past fall we watched the Seahawks live on the Pads via Xfinity cable stream, I even have a streaming documentary service called Curiosity Stream which I watch often…
But, I digress. Let’s get you a new NAS. You are too modest; of course you are tech savvy!. Your had more NAS than I have, so I would say you need one of the 4-bay PR 4100 models. Although you said the QNAP is out for repair, so stay with it if it is serviceable again. Actually, some very savvy guys here have QNAP and Synology NAS boxes as well as WD ones.
Since you say you have Alexa devices, definitely setup a Dot to send audio out from cable to your stereo. When the Dot first appeared, I bought one to exclusively connect to stereo. We now have 8 of them in house, along with Echo, Tap and even Google Home! We control important lights with them.
Alexa and Plex work great together.
I even posted a link at this forum to help others set it up, and here is that post. It directs you to another longer post at the Alexa forum where i also hang out.It’s a bit long, so spend time with it later if you need to.
Enuff for now. Time to grill the burgers!
