Minimserver not visible and transcoding/playback "on the fly" for Naim Unitiserve-SSD

[simoncn]

I hadn't realised that the UnitiServe is a player as well as a server. I have looked at the online user manual and it appears that the UnitiServe can only play music from disc files and cannot act as a UPnP renderer to play music from a UPnP renderer such as MinimServer. The UnitiServe is able to act as a UPnP server, but this doesn't help in your situation. I found this information on page 18 (Operation - Playback).

This means that you would need to use a different UPnP renderer for your FLAC/WAV comparison experiment. You suggested doing this on a laptop and this might be possible by installing suitable software on the laptop, but the quality of the laptop sound card would be so poor that any difference between WAV and FLAC would probably be masked by the sound card deficiencies, even if the output from the laptop sound card is routed to a hi-fi system.

You could perhaps borrow a high-quality UPnP renderer from a friend to do the experiment. However, even if the experiment produced satisfactory results with MinimStreamer WAV transcoding, you would still have the problem of needing to spend money to purchase a UPnP renderer with similar sound quality to the UnitiServe.