Expensive Christmas...

Wow Bert, wish you would've checked with me before purchasing that Fraim. 

555PS x 2 / NDS / 552DR / 500 

That looks like an 8 Tier Fraim min.

I could've saved you some Cash on that Fraim, all you really needed was a three Tier Fraim to complement your 40 K Speakers.

555PS x 2 / NDS / Statement

Merry Christmas Bert!!!!!!!!

Buy a Statement in order to save on the high cost of Fraim?

There is simply no disputing this logic!

Enjoy your system rebuild Bert - a fun way to spend the holidays!

Hook

Smart suggestion on the statement. I will have a talk with my bank -

Just called the bank.......

Bert Schurink posted:

I now brought a Naim Fraim, after I bought the Melco earlier this month. So a very expensive Christmas. But honestly I also can't wait until everything comes together and I will have reached the end of the journey. And of course I still could contemplate about a second 555PS and dream about the NAP500 DR upgrade. But for now I feel I have reached the right level.

I will update all of you on the experiences when the Fraim is installed.

Wow, congratulations Bert. What Melco did you go for? I went to a local "audio evening" and was really impressed with the massive improvement it brought to the streaming party.

I'd be very interested to hear more about the Melco. Are you going to get one too Dusty?

I can be short and direct about the Melco. It's a must have enhancement of your NDS. Dealers can be very often very lyrical about the new toys they got but in this case I would have to agree to what he was saying: Naim Streamers shouldn't be sold without an Melco. 

So what does it do: huge reduction of digital noise, further increase of natural tonality, slightly better sound stage, better separation of instruments, rounder tone especially in bass..... It's a dream and as good as a box upgrade or even better. For the amount of money a no brainier. And with my current knowledge I would say don't even think about a standard NAS. I have already close to 4TB on board storage, which in the future I also could increase by either plugging in bigger disks or expanding with another external disk.

Go and get your one before they are sold out :-)

Harry posted:

I'd be very interested to hear more about the Melco. Are you going to get one too Dusty?

I'll whisper this Harry...I have the N1Z on demo at he mo (arrived last night). Cheap it ain't, and I am busy trying to fault it and yet I can't. When I think about the technology, it just makes sense. I want to hate it due to the cost, i don't. I only popped along to a local audio evening not expecting anything really, and then the lights go down the music goes on and i'm thinking "what the heck" is that? We heard a Zone ripper, then the N1A. Could i hear improvements? Yes you bet ya 1's and 0's!!

Still early days, I am looking forward to enjoying her over Christmas. It even improves Tidal....I hate this hobby!!!!!!!

...and one thing I forget to mention. Right now I am just running it with FLAC as I am waiting to get a hold of a music server for the Melco which transcodes in WAV. So even more to come. But FLAC already beats my pimped old NAS (with special power supply) by miles.......

So N1A then Bert? Congratulations. The Melco, really is an "unsung hero"!

Dustysox posted:

So N1A then Bert? Congratulations. The Melco, really is an "unsung hero"!

.....for now I settled on the "normal" Melco, found the price of the other one too high....

I'm using the TPLink fibre media converters and 15m fibre to isolate my system, to very good effect. Andrew Everard reported similar benefits using these devices as described for the Melco, on first his Superuniti then in August his NDS. IIRC we both have a linear PSU on the media converter (fibre <-> CATx) at the music end.

A good lower-cost alternative?

Thank you all. That's of great interest. I hope it develops further still. And that you'll share your experiences.

One thing I'm unclear on Burt is can the Melco work with a nas drive in the sense can you easily move music/data around from one to the other? I need more storage than 4TB.  Can you just plug in your nas directly into the Melco?  You mention a nas that will transcode to wav so it sounds like you still have use for a nas.  I just bought a nas drive (synology 716+) and two 6TB drives and it would be cool to use the two together.

blownaway posted:

One thing I'm unclear on Burt is can the Melco work with a nas drive in the sense can you easily move music/data around from one to the other? I need more storage than 4TB.  Can you just plug in your nas directly into the Melco?  You mention a nas that will transcode to wav so it sounds like you still have use for a nas.  I just bought a nas drive (synology 716+) and two 6TB drives and it would be cool to use the two together.

I will try this one as good as I can with my limited knowledge:

1. You could expand the storage of the Melco by sticking in the Melco bigger harddisks (so replace the standard 2 * 2 TB ones with bigger), experience on noise etc are standing out - not heard about this.

2. You could expand the managed storage by connecting other storage up to 16TB additional via USB connection of the Melco - Melco would manage it together with it's own storage as one.

3. Elsewhere available storage on the network can be used through Melco passthrough. In which case you still use the quality of the Melco, whatever the capacity you need.

Hook posted:

Buy a Statement in order to save on the high cost of Fraim?

There is simply no disputing this logic!

Enjoy your system rebuild Bert - a fun way to spend the holidays!

Hook

That's what I tried.  Clearly successful from an SQ perspective, not sure the bank manager would agree with the rest of the logic

Dustysox posted:

Harry posted:

I'd be very interested to hear more about the Melco. Are you going to get one too Dusty?

I'll whisper this Harry...I have the N1Z on demo at he mo (arrived last night). Cheap it ain't, and I am busy trying to fault it and yet I can't. When I think about the technology, it just makes sense. I want to hate it due to the cost, i don't. I only popped along to a local audio evening not expecting anything really, and then the lights go down the music goes on and i'm thinking "what the heck" is that? We heard a Zone ripper, then the N1A. Could i hear improvements? Yes you bet ya 1's and 0's!!

Still early days, I am looking forward to enjoying her over Christmas. It even improves Tidal....I hate this hobby!!!!!!!

I'm being loaned an N1Z today for a couple of weeks, along with a second 555PS to see whether I can decide if the PS is an improvement or not.  Pretty sure the N1Z will be.  I heard it at the dealers some months back and the sonic improvements were obvious within the first 5-10 seconds of the first track we played!

blownaway posted:

One thing I'm unclear on Burt is can the Melco work with a nas drive in the sense can you easily move music/data around from one to the other? I need more storage than 4TB.  Can you just plug in your nas directly into the Melco?  You mention a nas that will transcode to wav so it sounds like you still have use for a nas.  I just bought a nas drive (synology 716+) and two 6TB drives and it would be cool to use the two together.

You've got a number of options, as Bert indicated.

Think of the Melco more like a networking bridge or repeater.  Your streamer connects directly to the Melco (that's how it benefits from the low noise, reduced jitter etc).  Another port in the Melco connects it to your switch.  So when you want to listen to music on a NAS (not the Melco), it passes through the Melco and gains some of the benefits, but apparently not as much as music running direct from the Melco device.

I've got a Synology DS415 with 4x6TB in RAID combination, so 12TB of addressable storage.  I've got around 3TB of ripped CDs and am trying an N1Z.  As all my music is on a RAID controlled NAS and also backed up to two other NAS drives I don't need RAID on the N1Z which will give me 1TB of storage.  So I'll just copy over my most frequently played music to there.

Graham Clarke posted:

Think of the Melco more like a networking bridge or repeater.  Your streamer connects directly to the Melco (that's how it benefits from the low noise, reduced jitter etc).  Another port in the Melco connects it to your switch.  So when you want to listen to music on a NAS (not the Melco), it passes through the Melco and gains some of the benefits, but apparently not as much as music running direct from the Melco device.

This is a bit strange, isn't it? I would have expected that it is possible to setup the Melco to first retrieve the data from the NAS and then, once file transfer has completed, stream out to the connected streamer. Everything else amounts to handle data which is wholly available on the LAN as if it was an internet stream. This makes little sense to me. Am I missing something?

Thanks Bert just picked up this thread, I was sold on the idea of a Melco by my local dealer a couple of months ago, must demo in New Year sales ;-)

Great to hear how everyone gets on with theirs.

nbpf posted:

Graham Clarke posted:

Think of the Melco more like a networking bridge or repeater.  Your streamer connects directly to the Melco (that's how it benefits from the low noise, reduced jitter etc).  Another port in the Melco connects it to your switch.  So when you want to listen to music on a NAS (not the Melco), it passes through the Melco and gains some of the benefits, but apparently not as much as music running direct from the Melco device.

This is a bit strange, isn't it? I would have expected that it is possible to setup the Melco to first retrieve the data from the NAS and then, once file transfer has completed, stream out to the connected streamer. Everything else amounts to handle data which is wholly available on the LAN as if it was an internet stream. This makes little sense to me. Am I missing something?

I suspect it amounts to complexity of implementation within the software, or simply existing software constraints.

When accessing music stored on the Melco storage (HDD/SSD) I assume that occurs via the UPnP API from the streamer.  I'm not sure if that API allows daisy chaining of devices (NAS -> Melco -> Streamer) - anyone know?

If not, then the easiest solution would be for the Melco to simply pass the UPnP commands to the target device rather than trying to buffer content from a NAS and then serve it up again.  Hence my comment of "bridge or repeater".

Like many such devices the Melco probably runs some form of Linux which means that they are using features provided by the OS and other RPMs that are available/installable.  Unless they want to write a lot of custom code themselves they have to stay within those constraints.

Also, would buffering in the way you suggest make further improvements to SQ?  Possibly.  I don't know.

I think, but could be wrong that the Melco is not buffering traffic from the network. It just decouples it from network noise through direct connect between streamer and Melco. Already in that state music sounds much better than without the Melco.

When I had a Demo of an early version of the Melco it was a no-brainer large upgrade, That was at my Dealer with NDS and 2x555PS source. It sounded like the musicians woke-up from a snooze and were interested in what they were playing - when I eventually decide to go for a streaming system I will have a Melco most likely.

I also spent nearly and hour discussing how it all works with the Designer at a show - he told me enough that I could almost build one. But essentially it is the electronic decoupling from noisy commercial 'good-enough' power supplies used in switches and routers and re-clocking to reduce jitter that then presents the NDS with a quiet HiFi-grade network and does not task it to work too hard to recover the signal from the data, so it ends-up performing better - and you easily hear it.

DB.

Can the HDDs be user replaced? This is a big advantage of a NAS for me, the scaling and replacement of the discs. without data loss. If I need a new disk I don't want to have to send it back.

I've never got on with Twonky, although I suppose this is not a real issue because it is pre installed and configured in the device.  My understanding is that a Minimserver option is in development?

I could be wrong but I believe the Melco also can download direct from your HiRes purchaser, say HD Tracks, it integrates and downloads to the Melco direct from their site. A nice touch if you buy lots from their integrated suppliers.