Melco Audiophile NAS

[ptcl99]

I have not used Twonky on a Melco N1 ZH/2 for four plus years because of initial functionality issues. After several revisions, I thought it might have improved. I was also curious after reading other people professing a better Twonky sound quality on a different forum. Twonky is free so far for Melco users.

I used Lumin as the control point. First, Twonky found 1,584 out of my 1,613 albums in library reload. The subsequent automatic scanning dropped that to 1,430 albums with so many missing album covers (named Cover.jpg consistently).

I was still hopeful of the silver lining of sound quality. The comparison was made with a USB DAC and the Melco in: dark mode, rear LED off, power LED dim, SMB file sharing off, spanned array, fixed IP address, player port (unused) direct, and no Song Kong/Roon. Minimserver runs Minimstreamer without ffmpeg. On the first two tracks of Goldsmith’s Film Music (Telarc DSD), I found a clear contrast. Individual instruments possessed beautiful bloom in Minimserver. Space definition was remarkable with Minimserver showing a walk-in soundstage.

Supposedly, the media player has no sound of its own. However, the interaction with the DAC may be significantly in favor of less CPU burden. Following the same thought process, I am hesitant to run other bundled/paid applications. I have answered the sound quality question of Twonky versus Minimserver in my case. I hope most people get to ascertain this aspect for their particular setups.