Melco, S100 and Roon
Roon
Melco has benefitted from Roon endpoint capability with its music library products for a year now. This has proven to be great news for Melco owners.
There are two types of access to Roon:
- Roon Core – These are PC-based products that are able to run the Roon drivers/ software. The Roon Core is the brain of your system. It manages your music files, streaming services, and your audio devices. The Roon app connects directly to the Roon Core and streamer, and controls music playback.
- Roon End Point – This is what a Melco music library is. As we do not use Intel PC chips (for sound quality reasons) we cannot run the Roon Core software. In this case, a Roon Core is still need (this can be a Nucleus, a PC etc. ), the app connects to the Roon Core and the Melco becomes the playback device when connected to a USB DAC.
S100
The Melco S100 audiophile switch has been an extremely popular upgrade. It works in all customers’ digital music systems and provides a fantastic audio upgrade. I have even had customers report to me that it improves the picture on their Smart TVs!
The S100 has 4 x 100 MB Ethernet ports, 4 x 1GB Ethernet ports and access to 2 x SFP (fibre optic) ports making it a versatile switch. Speak to your friendly, local Melco retailer if you’d like a demonstration.
S100 in conjunction with Roon
Melco is synonymous with fantastic sound quality from stored, downloaded and streamed music. When you consider this, in conjunction with Roon’s comprehensive app and access to new music, it is a superb combination and many of our customers feed back that the combination sounds even better when used with a Melco S100 audiophile switch in the system.
Using an S100 with ROON
The above diagram shows the most stable connection when using Roon in conjunction with an S100 and a Melco music library, especially when controlling the playback of hires 24-bit/192 kHz music files.
How to connect Roon and Melco
The method to get a Roon Core to access music on a Melco is specified in the ‘Settings’ >’Storage’ option within Roon’; if you are unsure of which setup option within Roon to use, there are details here:
https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-i-m-having-trouble-setting-up-my-nas
The exact path that you would enter depends on your Melco model ,but would be of the form:
For v4.x – ‘smb:///internal’
For v3.9x – ‘smb:///import’ and ‘smb:///import_CD’
… where is the name of your Melco from the front panel (e.g. for a v4.x Melco with a name of N-1DF0 you would enter smb://N-1DF0/internal ) with a username and password of ‘nobody’ (without the quotes) when asked.
You can use the IP address of the Melco instead of if you wish (or if you need to if name resolution doesn’t work correctly on your network), but if you are going to use the IP address, then you really need to use DHCP address reservation on your router to ensure the Melco’s IP address doesn’t change (which would make Roon lose access to the Melco library when the Melco is given a different IP address).