MELCO

[GuillaumeB]

Personally I'm going to reserve judgement until I hear it in my system. 

In fact at the moment I'm envisioning a totaldac d1 v Nano Transport v Melco challenge! Now that could be fun 

Guillaume

This sounds most interesting.  Now if someone else could cover the Aurender, Aries, Antipodes, NAD-M50, Dialog (!), Astell & Kern, Pioneer N-70 (wild card entry), whatever I haven't thought of, whatever comes out next week etc.

Anyway, well done Guillaume for kicking this off, it should be fascinating.

You're right there are so many options! The thing is you can narrow things down considerably depending on your exact needs and of course budget. 

In a sense for me the "wildcard" is the Melco. I don't actually need any storage since I already have a 4 bay QNAP NAS with a SOTA network (yes considerable "sunk costs" there!). But I'm hearing a lot of good things about its sound quality so I'm really curious. 

I'm intrigued by the Dialog but I don't really consider this a high-end streaming solution. I think it was designed for the Phantoms and not the Expert range, hence the delays (for the Expert range) and some of the confusing messages from Devialet. I'm also uncomfortable about the USB connection between the Dialog and the Master, USB as far as I understand doesn't offer any galvanic isolation and I can only imagine the Dialog box will generate a fair bit of electrical noise; it's a very powerful wifi transmitter with an SMPS (I'm guessing?) not to mention other electronics. Do I really want to plug this directly into my Devialet? I'm not so sure. We were also told by Devialet on many occasions that qualitatively the AES/EBU input was the best input. But then again I'm coming from the totaldac d1 server with its obsessive attention to detail noise-wise (check out the graphs on the totaldac website - Vincent measures all this stuff!) and powerful reclocking capabilities, and it's connected via AES/EBU as recommended by Devialet. I don't doubt that eventually Spark will be an impressive control point and if streaming services are properly integrated it could be fantastically convenient. Still I will keep an open mind and will definitely give it a try in the Autumn or something by which time things would have settled down a little. 

Anyway I think there are a lot of good options out there. Including DIY efforts with Cuboxes and PCs, I'm sure these sound fantastic too! 

Guillaume