Changing Hard Drive in a Melco

[simoncn]

Disclaimer: I am not an electronics engineer but I know some clever people who are. The following is based on what they have told me and the results of my own experiments over many years.

All electronic equipment produces noise. A TCP datastream is not sent as a sequence of 1 and 0 bits but as a very high-frequency analogue waveform that encodes the digital 1 and 0 bits. Encoding this waveform in the server produces noise, sending it though a swtich produces noise and decoding it in the renderer produces noise. Some of the noise in the server and switch is transmitted to the renderer through the network connection. In addiition, reading the file from disk in the server (either HDD or SSD) produces noise, some of which is transmitted via the network to the renderer.

This noise does not cause a 1 bit to be changed to 0 or vice versa but it does interfere with the sound quality that the DAC in the renderer is able to produce.

Every system has a different combination of noise-producing components and any change that is made can make the sound quality either better or worse. In some cases, a change makes no audible difference because its effect is small compared with other sources of noise in the system.