MELCO

[amabrok]

Rufus thanks for an excellent write up!


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[AllenB]

I had a brief meeting with Alan Ainslee whilst he had is Naim hat on. A few years back now. Straight talking guy and the man almost solely responsible for bringing serving and streaming to Naim from what I recollect. It would be great if he joined in on discussions here!

Well, I guess Naim must be wishing that he'd stayed around for longer - their streaming strategy now seems well behind most of their competition particularly with respect to supporting on-line music services.

The Melco does seem like a complete update of the Naim servers which Alan brought to that company, and with added bells 'n' whistles. That might be an over-simplification, but the technical excellence must derive from Alan in the main. Be interesting to what happened to Naim and him, because NetStreams died soon after he left. Naim should be kicking themselves for losing someone who actually understands the whole serving / streaming process. 

[AllenB]

The Melco's sound marvellous from the write ups, just a shame then really about the case-work, or at least from the photographs, it looks a little 'uninspiring' or basic.

[amabrok]

The Melco's sound marvellous from the write ups, just a shame then really about the case-work, or at least from the photographs, it looks a little 'uninspiring' or basic.

it is indeed basic. when you see a N1Z you don't expect this sound quality to come out of it!

[PhilP]

Thanks Guillaume and Rufus for your excellent, detailed write-ups  It would be interesting to know what numerical scores you would award the Melcos for sound quality

Again I do have to question the pricing - whilst the N1A seems to be reasonably priced the N1Z seems well over the top. Comparing the specifications it's difficult to understand why it costs nearly 4 times as much as the N1A.  I know the N1Z has dual power supplies and SSD storage rather than HDD but you can buy 2*512GB Crucial SSDs for £240...

Did anything else come up in the discussions to explain the difference?

[EDIT: re-reading Guillaume's first post I saw that he said that the SSDs cost $1k each to make which accounts for part of the cost difference between the N1Z and N1A]

Thanks

[Rufus McDufus]

Again I do have to question the pricing - whilst the N1A seems to be reasonably priced the N1Z seems well over the top. Comparing the specifications it's difficult to understand why it costs nearly 4 times as much as the N1A.  I know the N1Z has dual power supplies and SSD storage rather than HDD but you can buy 2*512GB Crucial SSDs for £240...

Good question and I can't really answer it fully! The SSDs probably area major factor in the cost. Buffalo make SSDs but these are customised and not just in regards to altering the software designed to make them last longer. Like the TCP/IP optimisations on the ethernet ports I believe (I may be wrong on this) they've made changes to the algortihms determing where on the disk the blocks are written to and how they're read.   
The casework on the Z is clearly more solid and better looking too, though the front panels are very similar.

[Kunter]

Thanks for the excellent write up guys.

I understand you did not have time to try the MELCO's as NAS replacements to the TotalDAC server. Any plans to do so? With their attention to detail, I think it must provide some improvements and may be put the TotalDAC sound above the N1Z with USB to Devialet. Although the total price would be ***..

Cheers

[Jnan_devi]

Actually want to say "Congratulations" and "Thank you" . I truly humbly appreciate the efforts put in by G and R. read all posts. took two glass full of wine .

So its
N1Z, X100 at the top of the line followed by
N1A, N100.

Couple of questions:
1) I wonder if Cached SSD mattered for SQ, then N100 better than N1A because N100 does have 120G SSD which is more than sufficient for audio files?
- i m sure about from SSD there are other component to snub the noise, to keep power supply as quite as possible for separate sections in N1Z etc. but SSD might contribute too.
2) If there is SSD NAS replaced with HDD then it should also improve for N1A ?

[Rufus McDufus]

Thanks for the excellent write up guys.

I understand you did not have time to try the MELCO's as NAS replacements to the TotalDAC server. Any plans to do so? With their attention to detail, I think it must provide some improvements and may be put the TotalDAC sound above the N1Z with USB to Devialet. Although the total price would be ***..

Cheers

We did plan to do this but the major issue was with the Totaldac. It's rather inflexible regarding device naming. There were a few other issues too and it was all taking rather a long time and eating into listening time. It would have been interesting to hear though. [edit] - oh yes, we had to write a new OS image for the Totaldac with it enabled as a UPnP renderer and we encountered a few problems.
N1A/Totaldac vs N1Z could be interesting too as the price is about the same.

[weust]

TCP/IP optimizations? You can optizime all you want, but that won't give you better audio quality.
TCP/IP transfers packets of data. Nothing else.

And the whole SSD vs HDD is still vague to me.
A player will use a buffer (in memory) to play the audio file.
So whether it's placed on a SSD or HDD or USB stick or SD card won't make a difference.
It's all played from the buffer.