Hi Everyone,

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we now have the multi award winning Melco N1A Player / Server on demo.

I have been following the Melco products for some time and after all the positive things I’ve heard I couldn’t resist taking them on to have a play and so far I have nothing but positive things to say.

For those who don’t know, in the most basic terms the Melco units are basically NAS drives built and configured for HiFi Use, but they also double up as a local player to be fed directly into a USB DAC or amp, such as Devialet with a USB input, their other strong point is that you don’t need to use a computer to set them up, it can all be configured using the front screen and buttons.

Melco was formed in 1975 as a turntable manufacturer amongst other HiFi Products but then moved into IT and became Buffalo some years later, but now they are back in HiFi merging the 2 worlds creating Audiophile Storage solutions for HiFi which result in far better sound than the more traditional NAS drive route. This is achieved by Melco using products aimed at music playback, not just Data Retrieval, and also by using quality components and power supplies which has a big impact on sound quality.

Using a NAS drive to feed a streamer has been a great solution until now but a conventional NAS drive is designed with computer usage in mind, not to get the best from your music collection, these are 2 very different things and when it comes to music playback everything has an impact.

Any NAS drive is designed to sit on your network with the music having to be fed through your router, again another device that is built to a price using cheap parts that will add noise to music playback, the real beauty for me with Melco is that you can put it on your HiFi rack and feed your streamer direct meaning it doesn’t feed over long lengths of network cable and keeps away from your router, how this is achieved is that it has 2 ethernet ports, one to the outside world that sits on your network so that you can move music to it but more importantly the 2nd port is a connection direct to your streamer so feeds the streamer directly. I have installed our demo Melco N1A in our demo Naim rig so feeds my Naim NDS, NDX and NAC-N 272 directly and the improvements really are easy to hear.

So if you’d like to maximise your streaming setup or would like to try it as a dedicated player into a USB DAC, such as a Chord Electronics DAC, then please feel free to get in touch to arrange a demo.

http://hifilounge.co.uk/melco





Cheers,
Paul.