Melco, the Japanese maker of the N50 Music Library featured in this review, is not a household name among US audiophiles. Veterans may recall the Melco 3560 turntable, which was considered extravagant at its 1978 launch, in part because it supported three tonearms. Confusingly, several subsidiaries of the giant keiretsu Mitsubishi are called MELCO (for “Mitsubishi Electric Corporation”), but the maker of the N50 is not one of those MELCOs. This “Melco” is, rather, short for “Maki Engineering Laboratory Company,” and though it got its start in hi-fi, these days its best-known products are network-attached RAID arrays made by Melco’s American division, Buffalo Americas.
Melco’s audio division, known as Melco Syncrets, sells products similar to those produced by Buffalo Americas but tuned for hi-fi, including servers that incorporate all the digital elements that benefit from a being in a single box. The new N50 lacks only a DAC to be a complete digital source.
A digital-audio front end has several parts, and in the streaming era, those parts can be put together in different ways. It starts with a digital audio file, stored either locally or anywhere else—anywhere else on the whole internet—and ends with a DAC. The trend among audiophiles and manufacturers is to optimize every step in the process. Start with NAS drives, servers, or streamers, and go through digital-to-digital converters, network audio appliances, USB reclockers, isolators and signal conditioners, all perhaps with upgraded power supplies and optimized connecting links, and ending up at a versatile, high-quality, jitter-rejecting DAC. It conjures an audiophile’s nightmare, Zeno’s Achilles-and-the-tortoise paradox for the modern audiophile.
Eventually, one hopes, the data will become music and end up at your ears. But as complexity grows, so does cost, and the chance that incompatibility creeps in increases. That’s part of the challenge for streaming digital audio.
There’s another part: Many audiophiles have vast libraries of ripped CDs and SACDs and hi-rez music downloads, and these days most subscribe to at least one streaming service. Somewhere in the front end, there must be an application that manages that library and allows easy access to the music.
Upon unpacking ($5499), I was impressed with its clean, simple appearance. Starting at the left of the front panel, Melco’s distinctive brush-font logo is directly above an on/off button with an LED indicator. To the right are a USB 3.0 port—you can insert a flash drive full of music here, for playback or to transfer to the N50’s SSD—and a central alphanumeric display. The four small buttons farther to the right are for navigating the controls and setup menu (Back, Menu/Enter, Up, Down). On the rear panel, from left to right, are a USB 3.0 port optimized for sending music data to a USB DAC and then three other USB 3.0 ports, intended for connecting an optical drive (not included) for ripping and playing CDs, a USB drive for library expansion, and a backup drive. To the right of the USB ports are two Ethernet RJ-45 ports, one for connecting the Melco to your local network, the other a direct output to a network-enabled “Music Player”—more on that later. Finally, there’s an IEC power connector.
