Thanks for all the replies guys, much appreciated.
Will ponder as usual. One of the options I may consider is getting rid of the Melco and going for an Aurender. Not just for the app, but I guess I do feel a little let down that 12 months after buying the Melco the app is still not avaialble.
The Melco does sound great to me mind and that is the most important thing I guess.
I did a fairly extensive listening test of N1A and N1ZH today. I've just upgraded my 250 so I'm not flush with cash at the moment, and I was really hoping the N1A would convince me.
Sadly (for my wallet) I felt that the N1ZH was better all round. What swung it for me was the improved musicality and the extra detail coming through; I thought the build quality was significantly better too.
So the order has gone in and my new N1ZH should arrive next week.
Sound quaility of the N1A is great in my view, but so is the Aurender, just back from a two weeks holiday in the Netherlands where I used my Aurender a lot, the Aurender App is really much better than any of the 3rd party apps I tried on the Melco. Also much more stable. With the Melco I have to restart the app many times because it is losing connection/crashing, luckily it doesn't take long but it is annoying.
Looking back, I would have bought another Aurender.
Ok now nearly 2 weeks since I emailed Melco for an update on th app and still no reply.
Again the whispers are it is very close. I am ready to buy a cheap android tablet just to get the bubble upnp app, but would be gutted if I bought one and Melco released the app the next week or so.
Is the bubble app much better than Kinsky?
Can anyone shed any light on this?
I haven't used it for a couple of years, but to be fair the Bubble app back then anyway was pretty crude too, but it does work well.
Thanks for the reply Rufus, the new android tablet would only be used for the bubble app., so in a quandry.
Made do with Kinsky for a year now. I think this is poor from Melco
I just saw, that simoncn from MinimServer posted, that the MinimServer installation is now available for public download:
http://forum.minimserver.com/showthread....6#pid23526
You can read on the info page for installing Minim on the Melco that you can stop Twonky from starting once the Melco boots by editing an options-file in the Minim folder.
Thought that might be interesting for Rufus, since he doesn't like the auto library rescan of Twonky and if I remember correctly he mentioned it sounded better when only one server, Twonky, was running.
Hope I find the time to try the installation eventually.
Ah, I didn't see the bit about being able to stop Twonky - will take a look!
You'll probably think I'm nuts but I think Twonky sounds a bit better than Minimserver, despite me not liking it vey much
[edit] - and there's an ffmpeg binary avilable too. That means transcoding is possible now. Yay! I very much doubt the Melco's powerful enough to transcode to DSD512 though
Maybe it didn't sound as good, because there were two servers running on the melco, creating increased cpu load etc. and creating a bit more jitter?
Now you can rule that out, after disabling Twonky.
I thought I read somewhere, that Minim was more lightweight and less resource hungry than Twonky, but I can be wrong here.
I'm curious what you would find out.
A little off topic: Since I never really tried Minim, I wonder if you have to install MinimWatch on a computer to make all the changes to the behaviour of MinimServer on the Melco?
I meant Twonky sounding better when both were running, but yes we'll be able to do a fair test now! I assumed Minimserver was lighter-weight too but then it could be more processor intensive or something else. Difficult to know without measuring.
You do have to install Minimwatch elsewhere as far as I know.