If we don’t, we’re in big trouble!
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Interesting, in the demo did the Melco work as an upnp sever or just as a switch?
Both.
- We tried the ND555 into my Dealers Cisco 2960 to a non-Melco NAS as baseline.
- Then we just inserted the Melco - not hosting music data itself, but just routing it through ‘doing nothing’ - but that was the biggest upgrade in the tests.
- Then we hosted the music from the Melco itself and that was about half-again as much improvement as above.
Improvements were in terms of clarity - reduction in smear and murky colouration revealing more music detail - and more important to me was the sense of ‘aliveness’ the music took on. The cozy sleepy musicians were now interested in the music they were playing it sounded to me, making me also more engaged.
That is what I heard and why I go one for my own system.
DB.
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Thanks for clarifying! I guess I will have to seek out a way to demo one in the future to hear for myself.
My dealer tested the new S100 Melco switch. He strongly recommend it because the LAN isolation build in Melco‘s NAS is now separated in an external unit. So your findings made perfect sense! Even with a shitty NAS he got great SQ improvements. I will test a Melco NAS these days…
My son in law has experimented with tracks ripped on the Melco and a pc with the D100 and on a pc with a built in Teac computer DVD rewriter disc drive all to flac compression 5 in the versions done on the pc were done using using EAC to do the ripping . The meta data was taken out with MP3tag and the files just named 1,2, 3… .
The file sizes of the 3 versions were all identical at the end of that process. He then looked at the files with cmp on a pc running Linux as per the method described in the link (in post 88). He says they are all the same. He can hear the difference when they are played. So he opened them in Audacity the only difference is that the all melco rip is recorded ‘quieter’ he thinks. We played the files to various members of the family from 10 to 65 there was an equal split on preference over which was preferred. Younger liking the pc rips, older liking the all Melco rips.
You can make of all of that what you will…
While all this was doing on I was having a quick listen to a S100 switch at the dealer, to be honest it is a ‘bit’ different to a Cisco but that is not to say better. My name is on the list for a home demo which I think will be the only way to evaluate it.
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Curious. It is almost as if the Melco emphasised something relative to the PC ripping, e.g. HF, making the sound shrill to young people but compensating for age-related HF hearing loss in older people.
Can the two groups put anything into words as to what differences they hear - what makes them prefer the one they do?
Yes to me, the pc rips sound bright, the melco pc rip in the middle and the all melco rip softer and more detailed. By that point my son in law was repeating “bit are just bits” over and over again. Perhaps this is the equivalent of why electricity sounds better down a well engineered cable, intrinsically it the same electricity that will make a kettle boil!
Well done Peter. So the rips from pc and melco have exactly the same metadata , are presented identical and have the same size, but sound different. Less noise is the only difference probably.
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If the digital files are ‘identical’ how can one provide a lower volume. The content must be different in order to play at a lower volume on whatever renderer was used.
Peter’s report didn’t say the metadata the same, and even if it was, the file would need analysing to see if it is stored in the same way.
(Incidentally, I am unfamiliar with cmp so I don’t know if it shows whether that shows two files are have identical bits throughout, or what it shows)
He says the files are all the same. It’s not enough ?
That was after taking out the metadata.
And as I said, I don’t know what cmp compares - yes if it compares the entire file bit for bit, but I don’t know if it does that - there are other measures as well, such as checksum, which does not necessarily mean bit-identical. Perhaps someone with knowledge of cmp can advise.
But this is certainly useful in advancing knowledge.
Yes no metadata on any of the files. cmp compates files and if a report is not generated they are the same as I understand it. Perhaps we need another method.
No, “cmp” is fine. If A and B are “cmp” identical and you replay A and B (and not something obtained from A and B after adding metadata), then the only reasons why they can sound differently are external to the files. It could be that the replay system is sensitive to file name, order or replay, etc. There are many more possibilities …
Thanks for reporting! I am travelling now but I should be able to come back to this thread in the next days or, at the latest, on Sunday. Thanks again, nbpf
Re-reading your report, it appears the listening tests were on those stripped files, not on the originals with metadata, is that correct?
Meanwhile having looked at what cmp does, I confirm that as nbpf says it confirms that the two files have no differences byte for byte - so on that basis tghe two are identical. However, if I understand correctly, the two stripped files looked slightly different when analysed with Audacity. That does not make sense to me - one tool says they are the same, another finds that the extracted audio is different, which is consistent with the listening tests.
There is something going on here that needs a an expert in digital audio data - I think it is worthy of a new thread to catch people’s attention, so I’ll start one.
Thanks for all the interest in what we tried. Over to others on the new thread to see what they can come up with. What ever the reasons we are still realy enjoying the Melco!
I have (perhaps foolishly) borrowed a D100 from Cloney Audio to check this out. All of my 2000+ rips originated in a Unitiserve, which I acquired in 2013. The rips were stated to be “bit perfect”, of course.
So far only one of the four CD’s which I have ripped has shown up in Roon, but I can certainly come to the same conclusion as DB. The noise floor is lower and the sound is more musical. I am going to struggle about whether the difference is big enough to undertake a complete ‘Re-rip’, something I never expected to have to contemplate!
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