Melco Range OverviewDaniel Raggett - Melco Europe General Manager The Melco product range has grown and evolved over the past seven years, so I thought it would be useful to provide an overview of the products we have today, and how we got there. Melco first emerged with two products: the N1A/H40 (43cm wide) and the N1Z/H40 (35cm wide). These were both HDD-based UPnP servers with 4 TB hard drives (2 x 2 TB HDD) and both featured a key unique feature, two Ethernet ports: one for the signal from the router to the music library and another from the music library to the renderer/streamer (to make a direct signal from the music library to the renderer). Melco then added the N1Z/S10 (35 cm wide) flagship and the only SSD model in the range (2x 0.5 TB SSD). All the models were made up of 2 x equivalent HDD or SSD drives and involved a Raid system and controller. They all had multiple USB ports to attach a backup drive, expansion drive, optical drive and/or USB DAC; this was the MkI journey for Melco.
Today, Melco still has the same models in production, but in MkII guise; these have been available for about three-and-a-half years. The MkII models have different-sized HDD and SSD drives, a dedicated USB output for a USB DAC, improved power supplies, improved capacitors and more mechanical and electrical isolation engineered into them. About three years ago, Melco added two accessory products to the range in half-width chassis configurations, the D100 (high-performance optical drive) and the E100 (3 TB HDD expansion drive). Both are built in the same quality aluminium material as the music libraries.
With the introduction of these half-width accessories, two years ago, Melco launched two half-width music libraries: the N100 (the new entry-level 2 TB HDD, 21.5 cm-wide) and the impressive N10 (3 TB, separate linear power supply, 21.5cm wide) music library. This brought a great new option to customers who were either downsizing their systems or were space-limited. The last product to join the line-up was the S100 audiophile switch. Again, built in the same solid aluminium casework of the N100, D100 and E100, the S100 has brought a greater amount of detail, musicality and reduced noise to many customers’ systems since launch. Melco works fantastically well and perfectly complements many top brands, including Linn, Naim, Chord Electronics, T+A and many more, but the 100 switch has proved even more universal. Today’s Melco range N100-H20 – Entry-level 2 TB HDD music library. Three USB ports, two Ethernet ports, supplied with a 12 V DC off-board power supply.  N100-H20 – Entry-level 2 TB HDD music library N1A/2EX-H60 – Full-sized, 6 TB 3.5-inch HDD, five USB Ports including a dedicated Neutrik DAC port, 2 Ethernet ports, single high-quality military grade AC power supply (internal), single high-quality capacitor bank.  N1A/2EX-H60 N1Z/2EX-H60 – 35 cm-wide (Linn-sized), 6 TB 2.5-inch HDD, four USB ports including a dedicated Neutrik DAC port, two Ethernet ports, dual high-quality military grade AC power supply (internal), dual high-quality capacitor bank, high-quality mechanical and electrical isolation.  N1Z/H40 (35cm wide) N10-H30 – half-width 21.5 cm two-box unit. A ‘head’ unit with and OLED and separate linear power supply. Connected with specialist Neutrik three-pin connectors, 3 TB 2.5-inch HDD, three USB ports, 2 Ethernet ports.
N10-H30 half-width 21.5cm two-box unit N1Z/2EX-S40 – 35 cm-wide (Linn-sized), 4 TB 2.5-inch SSD, four USB Ports including a dedicated Neutrik DAC port, two Ethernet ports, dual high-quality military grade AC power supply (internal), dual high-quality capacitor bank, high-quality mechanical and electrical isolation.
All products are available in silver and black brushed aluminium finish.
8 Comments
A Customer perspective - Melco EX Series upgradeCraig Burrows  If you have a Melco system, I am guessing that, like me, you probably have a decent-sized library and whether you have it well organised or not, the EX upgrade will save you the frustration of hunting for the needle in the haystack. On top of that, the professionalism of Alan and his staff when they discovered a fault on my machine, needs to be applauded. They kindly fixed the fault at the same time as the upgrade, for no extra cost.
But why upgrade to EX when you already have a working system? Personally, it was not that it would become Roon Ready - although that is an avenue I look forward to exploring. For me, it was for the ease of cataloguing the almost 2 TB of Bach recordings I have carefully collated over the years. Also when you purchase an album, frequently you will find a couple of composers on the same recording and you are left with the choice of tediously organising folders and splitting up recordings just for ease of finding the one piece of music you are looking for. If you have the time, and precision to organise your library, that is not a serious problem until you start downloading straight to your Melco when albums get automatically assigned to the ‘Downloads’ folder. You could, of course, back up everything, reformat the drives, reorganise your library and upload again, but the time and effort it takes to get this right can be frustrating and tedious. Having purchased and used several programs which claimed to organise classical libraries with ease, I can testify that it is a gamble and I once had my whole library scrambled by software purchased, just because websites claimed that it was excellent at tagging classical recordings. Lesson learnt: always keep a backup. I look forward to never having to manually split recordings again! It keeps composers and works well organised. Another positive is when I search for the pinnacle of Bach’s Canon, his Mass in B-Minor (of which I own over 100 recordings), they are all available with a simple search and the information tagged with them has enabled me to discover new data. With the Melco Intelligent Music Library and SongKong music tagger, searching for, let us say, BWV 99, I can just look for the BWV field and find all recordings of that particular work available on my system. I even discovered that my organisational skills were not as good as they should have been and SongKong found pieces I had tagged incorrectly. Arrogant as I was, I first thought SongKong had it wrong, only to be pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. So, whether I have downloaded directly, or organised incorrectly, MinimServer 2, with SongKong can discover, tag and organise with the ease I have been longing for and if I want to change the way it is tagged, that is also possible. I can even use SongKong on my iPad to make changes directly to Melco thanks to Minimserver. Lutz recording, good as it is, has BPM that would have caused Shaw to faint! Is that important? To me, yes it is, sometimes I do not want to listen to Suzuki or Herrewege again, but I know I want a recording with a similar speed, or mood, and to being able to define my search with BPM is a blessing I did not know I wanted until the upgrade. Yet after all that, it is the listening experience that is important and Melco does not compromise where music quality is concerned. The beauty is that I no longer waste time searching for the right recording - all that is taken care of with the neat precision that you would expect from Melco and at the end of the day, we have not purchased music to fritter away time looking for that one recording, but for the joy of listening to it. Thank you, Alan and Melco. You have simplified my life and given me more time to enjoy stress-free listening. So yes, the upgrade fee is well worth it. The only question now is when I start exploring the wonders of Roon. |
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