Melco Audiophile NAS

[simoncn]

(10-01-2015 20:39)DavidHB Wrote:  My understanding of RTP (the network protocol used for media streaming) is that packet filtering would only prevent packets being sent to the player which its network controller would not accept in any case.

UPnP audio streamng uses HTTP, not RTMP (as I presume you meant to say). Packet filtering (if this is happening) might be removing some extraneous packets, but I doubt that this is the reason for the sonic difference. I think it is more likely to be related to the electrical signals that are used in packet transmission.