Melco Audiophile NAS

[ptcl99]

I have used a Melco N1 ZH/2 for years. I formatted the drives as Raid 0 per the recommendation of a German magazine and a former representative of Melco in Europe. I always have a nagging feeling that the system hardens high-pitched mass strings. They are delicate in concerts. The DAC is an analog-sounding R2R.

Upon reading Simon’s explanation in a different thread, I suspected that the noise from the read/write heads of the drives might be the cause. I went through reformatting the drives as spanned and reloading albums. Challenging recordings, including (1) Ivan Fischer’s Rachmaninoff No. 2 and (2) Kirill Petrenko’s Tchaikovsky No. 6 (4th movement), sound moderately smoother and more delicate. This result is achieved with the spanned array and the unused player port set to direct.

While Raid 0 might benefit certain music, spanned is better for classical music IMHO. If less drive noise benefits the square-waved data stream, I think the light Minimserver overhead on the CPU also reduces electronic noise. YMMV.