Melco v Aurender

[PhilP]

I have read this too. It's not telling us too much that we don't already know. The N1A does use commodity parts of course. He doesn't mention what's going on with the OS - i.e. there's some packet filtering on ethernet I believe and some other things - nothing that's necessarily innovative and probably mainly open source stuff - but not commonly used on other storage/transports.  Yes, it did make me self-doubt my decision to get one a bit, but I listen to the thing and it takes those worries away!    I haven't tried ethernet-only. I have a feeling the ethernet-only benefits are going to be a lot more marginal than USB. A lot of Linn owners are really liking them though.
It's interesting the cabling inside could potentially be optimised a bit - e.g. separate power and data cables. Pimp my Melco!

 

I would assume that the Aurender largely uses standard off-the-shelf components too. Given that it costs £1095 more than the Melco (in the UK) and even though the construction quality seems significantly better there must be presumably be an even larger profit margin for someone.  I guess the UK distributors dCS must take a significant cut

Guillaume's rather negative comments on Aurender SQ don't tie-in at all with what I heard in my system and what I understand Foxman heard with the same unit (N100 rather than N100H) in his and I guess we're both pretty critical of poor SQ... It will be interesting to hear what people make of the Aurender v Melco comparison that Oxford Audio plan.  Both units will presumably be well run-in by then so no excuses for the loser