Is Melco the new Hugo...

I've a couple of NAS's kicking around - a QNAP HS251 & a Buffalo something-or-other (sorry, not big on names of kit). After fiddling around with these at various stages (had to get Phil Harris to help me transfer music to the QNAP in the end) both are relegated to Time Machine backup duties, they're a pain in the bum. This Melco sounds very good, works simply and well. Why dick about with other stuff? Incidentally, I've also got a Raspberry Pi2 running and that isn't bad but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't sound as good as the Melco. Up until now I've been using a Mac Mini fitted with an SSD & optimised for audio. It doesn't sound as good as the Melco. So there it is. Simples!

Allan Probin posted:

tonym posted:

I've borrowed an NA1 from my dealer, Signals, for a bit of a play. A couple of minor glitches - the Melco doesn't "see" my Chord QBD76 DAC when using the latter's USB input, so I've needed to use my Luckit USB to SPDIF convertor. Then the Melco wouldn't allow me to create a folder, or import music, the latter cured by a reformat.

Anyway, I've been having a good listen and I'm pretty impressed. There's a weightiness and a more layered, cleaner sound. I'm now wondering what more the better one brings to the party. The app. seems to work well, albeit it's a generic one.

Mmm. Promising...

It probably works perfectly fine with a DAVE, and might even cure that bit of brightness you were experiencing.

I'm sure you're right Allan. The QBD76 requires special USB drivers even for Apple - and Chord haven't got round to producing one for El Capitan yet. DAVE's a much more amenable beast.

tonym posted:

I'm sure you're right Allan. The QBD76 requires special USB drivers even for Apple - and Chord haven't got round to producing one for El Capitan yet. DAVE's a much more amenable beast.

The Chord (well M2Tech) situation just shows why drivers for DACs was a bad idea.  The companies involved just weren't (aren't) big enough to (a) keep on staff someone to be continually developing and updating drivers or (b) have enough influence over Apple / Microsoft to ensure existing drives keep working!

I doubt we'll see many non-standard DAC drivers in the future.

(Yes I know DACs generally require a drive under Windows, but they are still "standard based" interfaces; just Microsoft have so far not seen fit to support USB Class Audio 2.0)

DUPREE posted:

The Melco is a nice looking piece of kit, however all it provides is the NAS component (or UpNP server if you want to be picky), no audio processing is occurring on that device and it is really no different than a QNAP or Synology.. It uses Twonky and a x86 motherboard. I guess I have trouble seeing it's value proposition especially since it is still using spinning disks and is a fairly well packaged set of commodity hardware.. If your looking for lower noise I would think a SSD solution with a Synology or QNAP is the way to go. Also the lack of swappable drives seems a odd omission in something this high end. The Auralic & Aurender are different animals they are actually streamers/renderers where there is a lot of room for diferentiation 

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought it had digital audio out via usb so can connect direct to dac and be controlled using mobile app. The NAS drives I've owned never had this functionality.

Im sure the two off the shelf internal drives in the Melco could be swapped if broken. No different with likewise naim products.

OK, so I've borrowed the N1Z, & the DAVE (again). For some reason I can't get the app. working properly - the playlist only allows one track at a time to play, and you can't skip to the next track for some reason. Shame, it sounds (using my old DAC for the time being) even more promising. Sorry, my patience for such things isn't terribly good.

Experts are working at this annoying little glitch.

Download Kinsky and set the Melco to Mode 1 controller.

Go Settings > USB DAC > Controller. 

James

Yep, done that James.

Strange - the only time i had issues with it not playing the next track in a playlist was when it was in mode 0 - set to mode 1 all was fine. Hope you get it sorted. 

The boffins at Signals Towers correctly deduced that the Melco, being pretty stuffed with music, was busily indexing itself. I left it on all night & this morning, all is well.

Onward!

Boffin -great word - had to google that.

The boffins at Signals Towers must be so much better than the boobs at Fawlty Towers

Some quotes from Rob Watts. Seems to me he is pretty clear that galvanic isolation eliminates RF issues:

"To eliminate the RF and signal correlated noise on USB you need galvanic isolation."

"For both tt and Dave, usb is best, closely followed by optical, then last is coax."

re the difference between Hugo and 2 Qute:

"It depends a bit. Listening on optical or coax they are pretty much similar - except 2 Qute needs more breaking in and should be left on.
On USB its more complex and depends upon the quality of the source. Using low power mobiles or DAP is OK, but a PC will have a very substantial improvement due to the galvanic isolation on 2 Qute, which will improve sound-stage depth and refinement.
On the other hand, using Hugo can allow you to feed the power amps directly, and that will give you an even bigger improvement."

"Going back to when Hugo first came out, I noticed different SQ with different lap-tops and PC's.

Now the problem is definitely not jitter from the source - my DAC's can tolerate 2uS of jitter and it will have zero difference to the measurements - also the USB is isochronous asynchronous so the timing comes from the DAC clock, so source jitter is not a problem.

So I looked into the issue of different SQ with sources and found two sources of error:

1. RF noise. RF noise is a major pain with audio. With analogue electronics, very tiny amounts of RF noise will cause intermodulation distortion with the audio signal, and the intermodulation products is noise floor modulation. The effect is that the noise floor changes with signal level, and the effect is very audible - you perceive it as a brightness to the sound quality. Less noise floor modulation, smoother sound quality. The curious thing about this is that the brain is very sensitive to it, so you can easily hear it. Problem is that many listeners hear the brightness as more detail resolution, and so think it sounds better - but that's another story.

2. Correlated current noise. If a tiny current that is signal related but distorted enters the ground plane, then this current will be a source of error, as the current in the ground plane induces small voltages. Now this then adds or subtracts to small signals, thus degrading small signal resolution - and this upsets the brains ability to calculate depth. Now one of the most fascinating things I discovered with Dave is there is no limit to how small this error can be without a degradation in depth perception - so it does not matter how small the error is it will have an impact.

So the solution to the above problems is galvanic isolation. This means that RF noise from the source can't get into Dave, and small correlated currents can't get in too. And this approach gave two benefits - much smoother sound quality, and a deeper soundstage.

Now with Dave I can no longer hear which source is connected, but before without the galvanic isolation it was easy to hear. Additionally, optical sounds almost identical to the USB, as optical is clearly galvanically isolated too."

Halloween Man posted:

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought it had digital audio out via usb so can connect direct to dac and be controlled using mobile app. The NAS drives I've owned never had this functionality.

Synology and QNAP both allow you to connect a USB DAC directly.  Not necessarily on all their NASes but certainly on the newer "consumer" grade NASes.

likesmusic posted:

 

1. RF noise. RF noise is a major pain with audio. With analogue electronics, very tiny amounts of RF noise will cause intermodulation distortion with the audio signal, and the intermodulation products is noise floor modulation. The effect is that the noise floor changes with signal level, and the effect is very audible - you perceive it as a brightness to the sound quality. Less noise floor modulation, smoother sound quality. The curious thing about this is that the brain is very sensitive to it, so you can easily hear it. Problem is that many listeners hear the brightness as more detail resolution, and so think it sounds better - but that's another story.

 

Interesting. That reminds me of a 'mod' for the Linn DS players that did the rounds of the Linn forums a few years ago. This involved removing the Ferrite core on the internal mains cable between the players IEC socket and the SMPS. According to the forums, the result was much more detail etc..

Curious, as to its effect, i tried it and yes the initial impression was a brighter, more detailed sound. One mans detail is another mans harsh, hard sound. The core soon went back on.  

So I've been merrily listening to the N1Z, & now I've bunged DAVE on the end. Yes, good, but not convinced it's a whole lot better than the cheaper Melco into my QBD76. I shall continue listening. Certain fellow forumites are descending tomorrow, be interesting to hear what they make of it all.

Melco tweet from Bristol they have a CD ripping solution that drops the rips direct to the Melco, bit perfect etc. 

Yes, I heard about that too Dan. Apparently you use an Apple disc drive. Plug in, pop in CD, it rips automatically. Melco are also bringing out their own app., although at the moment I'm finding Kinsky pretty good. It happily "sees" the music stored on my iMac & you can add files to the playlists willy-nilly. Clever.

I use Audionet iMM also as an app, my only next step is finding a way to search music library while in direct mode. In this mode the N1A becomes the control point and the 272 shows the N1A on the front panel but I can't use any apps for the library. Been told to assign IP address and not use DCHP, so testing what can be done.

If the new Melco app allows me to browse my library while in direct mode :-)

New 2.30 software loaded last night too.

I'm hoping they'll make it Roon ready - the interface looks superb. I always quite liked Kinsky from my Linn DS days so it's been quite good to return to it. Basic but does the job without much fuss. 

tonym posted:

So I've been merrily listening to the N1Z, & now I've bunged DAVE on the end. Yes, good, but not convinced it's a whole lot better than the cheaper Melco into my QBD76. I shall continue listening. Certain fellow forumites are descending tomorrow, be interesting to hear what they make of it all.

Does the Melco support direct USB to the QBD76 or are you using a separate USB to SPDIF converter?

The QBD76 has a custom Usb input implementation using a fpga and requires special drivers. The Melco doesn't see it, so I need to use my Luckit USB to spdif convertor, then via bnc co-ax. Melco sees DAVE via usb no problem.

Eloise posted:

Halloween Man posted:

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought it had digital audio out via usb so can connect direct to dac and be controlled using mobile app. The NAS drives I've owned never had this functionality.

Synology and QNAP both allow you to connect a USB DAC directly.  Not necessarily on all their NASes but certainly on the newer "consumer" grade NASes.

 

thanks, didnt know that. in that case then i guess the only advantage for the melco to me would be if it radiated less rfi than other similar devices, mac mini included

likesmusic posted:

So the solution to the above problems is galvanic isolation. This means that RF noise from the source can't get into Dave, and small correlated currents can't get in too. And this approach gave two benefits - much smoother sound quality, and a deeper soundstage.

No No No. Galavanic isolation breaks earth loops and stops a noisy ground flowing into your electronics. It does NOT  stop RF noise - it physically just can't do it - otherwise Marconi would not have been able to do his stuff in the 1890s.

So yes low frequency noise modulation on the ground from a noisy computer  yes - galvanic isolation will stop. However RF modulated earth currents will couple across a galvanic isolator.. it won't care. You need other methods to address RF alternating current.

Simon

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

likesmusic posted:

So the solution to the above problems is galvanic isolation. This means that RF noise from the source can't get into Dave, and small correlated currents can't get in too. And this approach gave two benefits - much smoother sound quality, and a deeper soundstage.

No No No. Galavanic isolation breaks earth loops and stops a noisy ground flowing into your electronics. It does NOT  stop RF noise - it physically just can't do it - otherwise Marconi would not have been able to do his stuff in the 1890s.

So yes low frequency noise modulation on the ground from a noisy computer  yes - galvanic isolation will stop. However RF modulated earth currents will couple across a galvanic isolator.. it won't care. You need other methods to address RF alternating current.

I seem to remember that Rob Watts said there was the equivalent of 5pF coupling with the galvanic isolation he'd designed. Sounds pretty small but not sure just how effective that is at stopping RFI leaking across

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

likesmusic posted:

So the solution to the above problems is galvanic isolation. This means that RF noise from the source can't get into Dave, and small correlated currents can't get in too. And this approach gave two benefits - much smoother sound quality, and a deeper soundstage.

No No No. Galavanic isolation breaks earth loops and stops a noisy ground flowing into your electronics. It does NOT  stop RF noise - it physically just can't do it - otherwise Marconi would not have been able to do his stuff in the 1890s.

So yes low frequency noise modulation on the ground from a noisy computer  yes - galvanic isolation will stop. However RF modulated earth currents will couple across a galvanic isolator.. it won't care. You need other methods to address RF alternating current.

Simon

simon are you sure 100% galvanic isolation does nothing to temper high frequency noise? An experiment at http://thewelltemperedcomputer...alvanicIsolation.htm shows no visible traces when using galvanic isolation over usb from a cheap noisy computer. this is also my interpretation of rob watts comments, he does not distinguish between low and high frequency noise. i am not talking about airborn stuff like rfi/emi from a microwave oven but physicals connections between devices.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

likesmusic posted:

So the solution to the above problems is galvanic isolation. This means that RF noise from the source can't get into Dave, and small correlated currents can't get in too. And this approach gave two benefits - much smoother sound quality, and a deeper soundstage.

No No No. Galavanic isolation breaks earth loops and stops a noisy ground flowing into your electronics. It does NOT  stop RF noise - it physically just can't do it - otherwise Marconi would not have been able to do his stuff in the 1890s.

So yes low frequency noise modulation on the ground from a noisy computer  yes - galvanic isolation will stop. However RF modulated earth currents will couple across a galvanic isolator.. it won't care. You need other methods to address RF alternating current.

Simon

Simon, that is a straight quote from Rob Watts. I think it is unlikely that he knows less about how the Dave deals with RF than you do, so if he says that RF noise can't get into the Dave then, with respect, I believe him. He has said in interviews that the galvanic isolation on the TT is done in an unusual and interesting way, so perhaps this includes dealing with RF. I am sure he would not make a claim that was untrue, he has been so open about so many aspects of his designs. If you disagree with him, why don't you engage him in debate - he posts regularly elsewhere.