I’m exploring changing my digital setup and have been trying to get my head round Melco equivalent products
- System at the moment 2.5 TB music library on a Melco N1HZ/2 EX
- Chord Qutest dac
- Controlled by various not dedicated IOS or Android apps. This is the weakest part of the system as creating playlists has become a pita. The Melco app is pants.
I’d be very interested in recommendations and suggestions – just exploring atm, but keen to hear about new and equivalent products.
Thanks – and an early Happy New Year to you all
I split out my digital system into distinct parts that are not married to each other, it lets me plan for one of them going belly up.
NAS Boxes store several TB of rips, needledrops and downloads. I use QNAPs, Synology is an equivalent brand, for me these 2 stand out among the numerous offerings for their ease of use and regular security updates, plus being popular lots of users on forums to assist. Various backup and redundancy options in place. You could keep the Melco as a NAS but it’s a lot of wedge to tie up, selling it and buying a normal NAS makes more sense I guess.
Server - at the moment it’s an Intel NUC running Roon as a ROCK install - all this box does is act as a Roon Server. I have used various alternatives over the years, Logitech, JRiver, Media Monkey, Assett etc. For my use case Roon is my chosen option, I serve up multiple music sources both on premise and cloud. I also use the advanced options it offers - DSP and the like.
Control Points - Phone, Tablet, Mac and PC. Roon has an excellent GUI and because it runs on lots of kit you have a consistent UX.
End Points - all sorts, Dac via USB off the ROCK for the whole home ceiling speakers, the rest via Ethernet which I prefer as the connection method for the main/serious systems. Had more makes/models than I can remember, almost all kit is Roon Ready these days.
If Roon dies I‘d flip to something like Logitech with Material Skin or an alternative that is not tied to a particular system, Auralic Lightning DS is one of the better Apps but limited to Apple. The Aurender App was very good, maybe that’s why they didn't support Roon last I checked.
Nothing is perfect, Roon now requires a live Internet connection which is a problem for some users, Roon are not for U turning so I expect some subs will be lapsed, also Roon has been bought out which will put some folk off. Some have had issues, one pfm member seems to have had a lot, personlly over several years I have had one annoying problem where new rips on a NAS weren’t auto scanned in. - that bug was fixed after a good while and no show stoppers before or after have spoiled my Roon experience.
Roon does divorce you from a manufacturer supplied App so you can chop and change Control and End Points and not have to learn a new GUI, it also links different makes together for multiroom just like SONOS but with pretty much any combo of hardware - Pi, Denon, Yammy, dCS, Auralic, Cambridge, Integra are all available to me and can play the same or a different song at the same time.
Innuos seems to have gained a lot of traction, it’s been mentioned as something I should look at changing to a few times when we have been having demos at various dealers and seems worth you investigating as a Melco option, although you are then somewhat tied into their ecosystem and they do seem to focus on USB which puts me off. If you do a search on pfm there are a few threads that should shed some light on other options like LMS.
