Melco Audiophile NAS

[DavidHB]

@simoncn

I'm a bit disappointed that you have had only one response so far to your interesting post. I suspect that on, say, the Linn Forum, your report would by now have sparked all kinds of argument and counter-argument, with people taking up quasi-theological positions on the various technical issues.

I am intrigued as to how you came by this piece of kit and why you chose to test it. Information on the web is remarkably sparse. The post to which you linked is a (rather informative) product announcement, but I can't find anyone who is actually selling the item as yet.

That apart, your post is of particular interest both because it comes from you and because of the way in which you have been able to narrow down the range of possible causes of what you have observed. By now, you must know as much as anyone about the specifics of running music server software on NAS hardware. Moreover, in this forum and elsewhere, you have always taken an open-minded but sceptical approach on the question of whether network components can affect sound quality. So your observations in this instance were, as you implied in your post, counter-intuitive, and therefore worth taking seriously.

Was the "very noticeable change in the clarity and transparency of the music" you observed in any way comparable to the change in SQ you experience as consequence of transcoding your files to WAV24? The reason I ask is that increased clarity and transparency is what I get from transcoding. If improving the network configuration can add more of the same, that is potentially rather good news.

If the change is the result of the configuration of the network components rather than the working of the NAS as such, I certainly agree with you that we are unlikely to be seeing any change in the actual digital content delivered to the player. The only other variable I am aware of that can affect SQ is the timing of that delivery, in other words the dreaded jitter.
One can at least conceive of ways in which the removal of electrical noise from the network connection (which is presumably the purpose of opto-isolating the port) can reduce timing inaccuracy. But I do not have the knowledge to judge whether this could in any way explain your observations.

There is also the fact that you are using a Linn player. AFAIK, Linn ties the DAC in its players to its own clock when playing network streams, and so does not use the clock data provided by the source. (This, I had always understood, was the reason why FLAC files ripped from a CD sound better on my player than the same CD played on my CD player used only as a transport, and so delivering the CD data to the same DAC as the network stream.) If opto-isolating the network connection as you have described improves the performance even of the Linn DAC/clock combination, that is a remarkable result. Would the result be the same if the opto-isolation were at the player end, one wonders.

I look forward to any further information you can glean on this interesting subject. In the meantime, I shall remain as sceptical as ever on the issue of whether network cables can affect SQ ...

David