Melco Mania

[Camphuw]

I’ve not tried ripping through the Prestige yet as my MacBook struggles on, and dB poweramp suits me well. I’ve not tried AIFF.

Certainly the black box sounds better than either of my Qnaps.

[Bluesfan]

Thanks. Great to know that we are not the only ones hearing these differences or deluding ourselves!

We did find that feeding the Prestige 3 to the dac via ethernet & the OpticalRendu removed a fair degree of brightness, brilliance and relentlessness, thereby making music sound calmer and more natural. This is apparently due to better isolation of the dac from the server’s RFI emissions than a direct usb feed from the server can afford.

[Camphuw]

Interesting - my route to the NDS is via a Netgear 48 port switch, which I must get around to replacing with a Cisco.

The brightness does annoy me on classical music; yes it is relentless. I’ll chat to Martin on his return.

[Bluesfan]

A thought. I bought a StarTech GLCSXMMDST SFP Module (from Amazon UK) for about £40 and plugged it straight into the Cisco switch. The SPF modeule is then connected via an OM1 fibre optic cable to a Sonore OpticalRendu.

With this combination, the OpticalRendu serves as a Roon endpoint. The set up also isolates anything downstream of the OM1 cable from upstream RFI.

It calmed down the degree of relentlessness and brightness that we were hearing when the Prestige server was connected directly to the dac via USB.

If you want Roon and can use the NDS as a very good dac, this set up might be viable for you too.

Alternatively, the new Uptone Audio EtherRegen may well provide the same isolation for you, while leaving the NDS to run as an ethernet connected streamer.

Best regards, BF

[Camphuw]

Thanks for the ideas @Bluesfan … this stuff is all new to me, so much to research and discuss with like minded people.

[Bluesfan]

Indeed. It took me literally months to read up on many of the different possible architectures for streaming and then to try a few out for myself. Yet I still understand barely 10% of what the real technophiles such as SiS write. That’s why I started the thread Music streaming - it’s hard to find the right time .

Hopefully we can all learn from each other’s experiences and set up tweaks to obtain the best from our music streaming systems.

Best regards, BF