Melco music lovers are always looking for sound quality improvements.
The new N1 and N5 set new standards with a totally new mainboard, and this is prompting many to consider changing their existing Melco for the new one – certainly a great upgrade.
And N100 owners can easily improve their systems by upgrading to N50 or N5. But should the old Melco be sold or donated to the kids?
Well that is one option of course, but you will see from my related Blog that spreading a large library across several Melcos is a great usability upgrade, so why not split the library across two (or more) Melcos and hang on to the original machine?
This all makes perfect sense when you realise that the ultimate sound quality is set by the Melco that plays the music into a USB-DAC, or the Melco that is connected to the network Player using the PLAYER port.
So the new upgrade machine defines the absolute sound quality, but the library is split across multiple machines. The new Melco becomes the Master. The library is spread between music on the Master and on the original machine.
Of course there is now more capacity, but the really clever aspect to this is that each Melco can have a specific MinimServer setting for Classical, Rock, or Jazz.
So by dividing the library, the appropriate UPnP server setting can be applied.
Operationally, each server now only has a proportion of the library to deal with, and so the speed and stability of the Control point (App) improves dramatically.
This example shows three Melcos with Classical, Rock and Jazz. The best machine is an N1 with a local library, and this is used to play into T+A DAC in this example.
.MinimServer can even be configured in more detail than the basic Rock, Jazz, and Classical that is pre-configured by Melco for every new machine – so MinimServer can be tailored to you exact musical tastes, differentiated by different Melco servers.
So for example you can set your precise tag regime for each Melco/server.
One additional point – as the secondary servers are sending data to the master server over Ethernet – there is a significant benefit to using an S100 or and S10.
When it comes to dividing your library, this is where SongKong becomes a huge benefit. Not only will SongKong provide a rich metadata set for each album, but you can use SongKong to help sort libraries by Genre.