the Nucleus has no ethernet direct connection, which is a strong point of the Melco.
That makes sense. Iâd also factor in how your media is split to which way you go. I have coming up to 2000 CDs which i own and are ripped and sit on the storage drive in the Nucleus. For me, whichever way i go in the future, all i need to concern myself with is the playback equipment in the room. Storage, library access, serving and audio networking is sorted out and located elsewhere so i donât need to worry about that in the listening room. Roon takes care of the library access for both local and streamed content. The front end (located in the study) for various playback systems in our house is as below. Nice and simple and sounds (as much as a server and network can) great.
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my musical library is not enormous because i am very selective. i keep only the best wines.
I stream perhaps 2 months a year tidal. So donât need today Roon.
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A new thread for staples and hole punches?
My recently acquired Audiostore Roon / black box came in at around ÂŁ1700. I canât quite believe that how good it sounds feeding into an NDS. I might even start listening to jazz again.
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Iâve done this demo twice over at dealers and twice more at home ( with N1A/2 and N1ZH/2.
For me:
Best: Uniticore or Unitiserve (canât tell them apart) direct.
Second best: UC/US fed into Melco
Third: Melco
My criteria for this ranking is judged on musical involvement, the believable reproduction of a musical event.
I understand that this doesnât tally with many contributors to this thread, but this is my truth as Iâve experienced it.
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Iâm thinking similarly re Roon James. More anonâŚ
Nice Vulcan model btw!
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i had the unitserve before, with also optional linear ps. Now the Melco n1a2. The later is better for me on natural sound quality aspect.
On involvement and prat, which are very important to my eyes, i didnât noticed that the Melco is inferior vs the serve neither.
I use nds/555dr like you,
However the differences between both are not night and day. Better take the n1z2 directly, if possible.
We all hear things differently - I believe I said that the other customer there wasnât convinced about the improvement, so I am not saying at all that I am right and others wrong - just reporting what I heard. Some people think SL2s are little or no better than SBLs, that active makes no improvement on the sound over passive, that a 552 isnât better than at 52/252, that nd555 isnât better than NDS. (Should perhaps put the word âsignificantlyâ in front of better in each case?)
Anyway, I wonât be buying until I have heard at home and am equally convinced here - and thatâs not happening this year anyway. I would Like to investigate other models too
Hello FR
Maybe I donât understand your response, but my Nucleus+ certainly has a direct internet connection. Its how I get my music. Am I missing something?
Melco has 2 ethernet connections: one towards the switch and the other towards the streamer. 2 switches at the back.
This second ethernet imput is called ethernet direct, with the streamer.
Itâs specially done with optical isolation from noise.
@bailyhill I think you are misunderstanding FR. The Melco basically acts like a switch and supposedly cleans the ethernet signal before sending on to the player. So you have one port thats fed in to the Melco which is from your network, the 2nd port is then connected to the ethernet of your streamer This 2nd port has some magical ethernet cleaning applied before sending it on to the streamer. They seem to believe missing out the normal ethernet switch is beneficial. Users seem to say it makes a big difference. Ohers are more sceptical as using a switch before the streamer would also clean it up to some extent. Its all a huge debate much like the benefit of streaming cables over standard to spec ethernet.
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Some have even gone beyond speculation and actually tried it in a demo - direct connection of Streamer to a normal commercial Ethernet switch then to music database NAS vs direct to Melco missing out on the normal commercial Ethernet switch in-between.
I had that demo - my Dealer switched the Melco in there - not even having it hold any music data and just âcleanâ the Ethernet of noise - and it was a large enough difference to impress me - musicians âwoke-upâ and the music was more alive and intelligible as a layer of noise and smearing dropped-away.
We then tried hosting the music on the Melco rather than from the separate NAS and the improvement was about the same again, but Iâd say 60% was from the first part and 40% from putting it all on the Melco. Melco do claim they have circuits to clean-up and isolate the Ethenet - you could assume for some reason they are not describing the truth but an audition shows the effect.
I home-auditioned that to have the same effect - also found that the Melco directly connecting to my ND555 made a separate contribution from the NAS - I tried an SSD Melco version vs a HDD Melco version at home to decide which I preferred - at one point I had the HDD version connected directly to the ND555 and had the other SSD version connecting via a switch - then I swapped that so I tried everything.
I ended-up choosing the HDD Version as the extra price of the SSD was not merited in my system and I liked an aspect of the presentation of the HDD version - they did an do sound different.
I also - later - asked for and attained a demo of Roon from my Dealer who does sell the full range of their products - we tried the best Room devices into the Statement system - I did not find it added anything at best and was in fact a fit worse in terms of SQ presentation to me. It added a hard edge and the presentation lost the natural neutral presentation the Melco had. It must be said there were lots of configuration settings on Roon that as we turned-off more and more features to make it more and more just a NAS I was liking that SQ better - so it seemed the less the processor was getting at the music the more I liked the end-result.
âŚall subjective and personal - Mania - speculation - or have an audition and find out - I prefer the latter.
DB.
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Ah, Ok I understand the importance and meaning of âDirect Ethernetâ connection. No the Nucleus does not have that. I agree.
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They arent â they are luxury goods. For luxury goods, cost to produce and cost to market are only some of the factors that go into pricing.
Do you think those $600 Gucci trainers actually cost that much more to produce and market than $90 Nikes?
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Hi Bart
Yes - true - notice that I did say âother things being equal (which they never are!)â.
(I know a wee bit about such matters having worked at BT HQ for a decade, among other relevant jobs.)
The point you make through applies equally to both of the âluxuryâ products.
In the example you give adding the Gucci brand enables the manufactuer to charge a much higher brand premium than adding the Nike brand.
Is there any reason to think that one of these hifi boxes is marked up even more than the other?
Melco are currently very in demand among a tiny small fraction of the hifi spod community globally - and Roon is trendy among a much wider group of audiophile types from what I can see.
So they both have reasons and the opportunity to add in a heavy premium at the moment.
Clearly, Roon are not a manufactuer (they are buying in a badged product which is more or less an adapted pc board in a trendy case), whereas Melco is a high quality manufacturer than is part of a bigger manufacturing firm IIRC.
So from that Iâd expect the Roon kit to be marked up even more than the Melco.
If that thesis is correct, it would give even more weight to my arguement above that:
âone would in theory expect the Melco [N1A/2] to be a better file store and server [than the Roon Nucleus +]â
i would expect the Roon nucleus to be on the same level as the melco n1a2, but with an additional linear ps. The standard Nucleus uses common SMPS, i think to remember. Just expectationâŚ
You missed one very important fact. Roon worked closely with Intel on the board to choose and in designing their own operating system to pull the full potential of the NuC and Roon without it dropping a beat.
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Hi CG
Iâm not claiming to be an expert in either of these bits of kit.
Iâve never heard either of them, and have not researched them fully at all!
I was in my posts above discussing some basic principles of pricing strategy that Bart introduced into the thread, and I then applied that theoretical knowledge to the little I know about these 2 bits of kit.
My argument was therefore theoretical.
I have no idea which box is better in terms of SQ or anything.
They obviously have different function sets too.
My argument is just that as they are the same price and one of them does a lot more functions than the other one does, youâd expect the Melco (which is a much more functionally focussed bit of kit) to store and serve files a lot better than the Nucleus+âŚunless they are priced âwrongâ relative to one another.
I think that arguement in principle is correct.
But it says absolutely nothing about which box actually does serve files best.
I have no idea which one works best in practice in anyoneâs actual system.