Melco N1Z

You should get commission from Norman Graham.

Sounds a load of BS for the money. I can't see him selling many. The SSD model is nearly as much as the new MOAD from Chord. I know which I'd prefer to buy, and which will sound better.

Thanks for your write-up Graham.  The Melco sounds like the kind of product the Unitiserve-SSD should have been. I've always felt that it's single ethernet, forcing dependence on an external switch of unknown provenance in the audio chain was a fundamental limitation. Along with the excuse for a power supply It ships with....

I'll look forward to hearing of your home experience.  Well-done server hardware, with something like the Roon software for library management, would seem quite a sweet combination......

Maybe you should have stopped reading after the second paragraph as I suggested Steve

I haven't heard the Chord MOAD, I assume it's the DAVE model?  Apart from a somewhat dubious name (will the next one be called KYLIE?  Or BUBBA for the Americans?) I can't comment on that as I haven't heard it.  Have you listened to the Melco?

A nice write up and you're certainly conducting the experiment on a system that should be able to reveal the differences.  I may just give Melco the benefit of the doubt on the SQ front, but the asking price is ludicrous.  Another thought, if Buffalo Tech is such a master of digital storage, you would think their non-audiophile NAS drives would be more popular.  A search reveals that there are those using some incarnation of Buffalo NAS around the forum, but I notice far more discussion recently featuring and recommending Netgear and Synology for example.  Buffalo kit is reassuringly expensive kit generally too, so we shouldn't be put off. ;-)

Thanks for that Graham. I have have doubts surrounding the serviceability, redundancy and upgradability of Melcos. Another grey area, more easily resolved by auditioning is the isolated socket which Melco hang a lot of sonic advantages on. I haven't heard a LAN isolator yet which didn't sit on the sound like a blanked. But as I said, that would be easy for me to investigate.

If it sounds good and it fits there's no harm. Never say never, although for me it's too propitiatory and sealed box for a NAS..

Ludicrous price?  Possibly, but then isn't paying roughly the same amount for a power supply (555) no more sane?  I guess the difference is that the benefits of something like a 555 are well understood and accepted which maybe makes the price seem more acceptable.  Clearly without a pedigree that's a much harder task for something like Melco.

Certainly true that Netgear, QNAP and Synology are well used and recommended here.  Not sure how representative that is of the overall market though.  Buffalo has a yearly revenue of £700M, so they're hardly small.  In fact they make Naim seem tiny!  Given they're a Japanese company it's possible they are more popular in the East.

Seems I'm not the only one with concerns over serviceability and upgradability then.

I don't think I would view it as a NAS replacement.  More just like another piece of kit.  And NDS is proprietary and a sealed box but that didn't put me off.

Thanks for the write-up Graham.  I'm always thinking about 'what's next.'  My uServe and QNAP and Synology nas's (mostly used for backup; the uServe remains my home server of choice) are more than serviceable, but I'm sure that there is another music server in my future at some point.  It's a fascinating 'technology space' to be watching.

Yes, there does seem to be a lot of technological advancements in this area vs. a slightly different/slightly better preamp/poweramp etc.

Probably should have mentioned that the Melco unit also has a USB output for DACs with appropriate input.

I have heard the Melco in this operation into a DCS dac and its pretty good, although not in my home system so its very hard to tell. You can use open source apps to control it, although i believe Melco are working on their own.

i was not aware you can use a NAS in a pass through mode with it. That is interesting. Thanks Graham for the review.

Agreed that pedigree and technical awareness, or acceptance, helps if you're going to charge upwards of even £1k for an audio upgrade.  I'm not sure what to make of it, but the price does seem overblown to me, baring in mind there's no software development here, I believe it just runs Linux and Twonky7, which is free to end users.

In my own setup, I am pretty confident the Melco would make no difference, as I do not use UPnP, the NAS is just a file share, so it's not processing audio at all.  For those using UPnP I feel that software is as much the key to great performance as anything else, and with the Melco, providing you feel that Twonky is the right choice, then all is well I guess.

Graham, you do realise that you are only imagining any improvement you may hear.

Ones is ones and zeros is zeros, and nothing can affect the sound on the digital side of things.

I admire your courage in putting this on a forum where if you said you had spent £5k on a cartridge you would have gathered admirers.

I will get back now to imagining the improvement I hear in my own system with my N1A.

Donuk

Ha ha, well done. Took me until the last sentence to realise you were pulling my leg and agreeing with my observations 

Let me tell you something, I've seen unicorn, man.  Top that!  

Seriously, when I listen to music, i don't hear ones and zeros, thankfully.  I've at no point suggested that the Melco makes no difference in the experiment Graham conducted.  

Very drole, you had me chuckling on that one.. Indeed if only life was that simple my job would be a whole lot easier.. Mind you they might pay me less 

SongStream,

I'm not sure that donuk's comment was aimed at you, at least I didn't read it that way.  Agreed, you've not stated no difference, think we are all good!

Less pay?  More (leading) zeroes than ones? 

No. I wasn't sure either, but thought I would try to clarify my position.  I wasn't joking about the unicorns though. ;-)

Harry,

Alan Ainslie (General Manager for Melco) emailed me regarding this question and I have his permission to copy his reply here.  Thought you and others may be interested :

But to answer one of your concerns – Warranty.  The N1Z and the N1A are not designed in any way following the IT ethos.  Sure we have a huge IT R&D department to draw on for the engineering, but implementation is real Hi-Fi.  We do not put a CD drive in the Melco for example – because the lifecycle of a CD loader and likely replacement parts issues is much less than the anticipated lifecycle of a Melco.

(And why would you anyway when the best bit-perfect ripper on the planet is the Naim Uniti Serve or HDX.  There is an application note to help set your Naim ripper to rip directly to the Melco).

So the warranty is 3 years for a registered unit.  Parts will be available long after that.  HDD will possibly fail but the SSD in N1Z is nothing like a IT market SSD.  And replacements will be available – maybe at higher capacity in years to come, but nevertheless available.

Backup in any event is really simple – a USB drive connected to the BACKUP socket will take date stamped incremental backups on demand.  So the default setting of spanned drives is fine in that situation.  Restoring is simply 3 button presses.

Similarly if you extend beyond the internal 1TB (4TB for N1A) then of course you gain  many of the Melco benefits playing from Network storage, but there is a simpler way – the BACKUP socket on the N1 simply adds whatever capacity USB drive is plugged in without any setup whatsoever. Not SSD for sure – so you might want to manage the music collection a little – but much closer to the goal than HDD on a Network.

Plus I'm also impressed that Alan was prepared to contact me directly.  General Managers tend to be pretty busy people!

Thanks Graham. That was courteous and very interesting. When it comes to things with a potential to change system performance I don't think I would ever dig my heels in and say "no, never, etc." but in the case of Melco (and its emerging ilk) it comes down to serviceability. I want to do my own disc swaps, volume expansion, crash recovery. I don’t want to have to send it away. This is why we went with the SSD version when we ran HDX.

Now, the pass through facility is something I didn’t know about. If music can stay at its current location and can somehow be cleaned up to give more musical enjoyment, regardless of what’s inside (because that old chestnut just knocks any discussion over and is often misguided), what I’m about to lay down on SL cable puts it well into perspective. So it’s interesting. As is stuff like putting an upgraded PS on the NAS. 

Graham, interesting reply... A bit puzzled about his 'IT market ethos'. I work in IT, as I suspect several do on this forum, and professional equipment has a high to very high standard of reliability to the point of possible over engineering in some cases.. with much equipment expected to last 5 years or longer of intense use.. mean times between failures are of prime importance... so I would expect  Melco to use IT industry grade hardware and state that as a plus if reliability was a selling point.

I wonder if he meant to refer to consumer  grade ' IT ' hardware, which seems to largely have a short  life with expected obsolescence and likely replacement within a few years when the new glitzy variant comes out. Very rarely do I ever see mention of mean time between failure as a selling point in the consumer space... It certainly is in the IT hardware industry space.

Simon

Graham do you have more info on this 'isolation' port. Physical isolation is of some benefit, certainly with RFI etc, but in my experience the greatest tangible benefit would be provided by creating a controlled bridge, or a routed subnet with certain broadcast forwarders such that the LAN traffic on that LAN segment would be minimised and so related TCP/IP data noise in the receiving or network player  stack would be minimised. I think this becomes more of a sensitive issue with combined streamer DACs like the ND series, perhaps less so with a seperate DAC.

Simon

Simon,

I'm in IT too (IT Security to be specific).  I believe Alan's comment to be in response to my concern that the IT industry is very different from what we have come to expect from Naim (and have been spoilt by in the process). 

Take for instance my NAP300s.  They're around 7-8 years old.  In next few years they will be due a service and I know that this will be no problem for Naim. 

Now consider consumer IT.  Chances of getting an 8 year old device serviced or repaired?  Absolutely zero.  Buy a replacement and move on.

Enterprise IT - well, slightly more chance but if you bought a product at the end of its sales life cycle you may be out of luck 7 or 8 years later.  Most companies depreciate HW assets on a 5 year term so would typically expect to replace then anyway.

So I think Alan is saying that they are not following the typical IT model.