Interesting Product to Review

The MELCO N100 was an interesting product to review because it was the first different digital music source I have spent any serious time with and as with any good hifi product there were important things to be learned from this time. MELCO as a company history is stemmed from audiophile passions and high end computer peripheral manufacturing and this puts them in an ideal position to produce high end digital music storage and source products like the N100

Listening Sessions

I conducted several listening sessions with the MELCO N100 and was impressed with its sound quality, it was much better than I expected it to be. The sound was detailed, relaxed and very together and I could tell its a high quality digital source that has been well designed.

Upscaling the System

I could tell pretty quickly the N100 was a capable and quality unit and I wanted to see how far I could push the sound quality from it. I made some changes to the system and improved the amplifier and Tellurium Q cabling both power and interconnects. I also changed the power supply to the N100 from the included switching power supply to the JCAT 200w Linear power supply. These changes helped to demonstrate just what the N100 is capable of.

Simple, Easy to use and very good

I ended my time with the MELCO N100 in a happy place, I really liked how it worked and enjoyed how simple and easy to setup and use it is. Its very much a plug and play solution with a lot of attentions to details paid to the important user interaction experience. I think the ​MELCO MusicHD could do with some work to make it more user friendly and pretty but its still very functional and gets the job done.

Final Thoughts

​The N100 is a pretty significant product because its offers the MELCO build design, build quality and sound quality for the lowest current entry price point of £1800.

Adding on the D100 to allow the playback and ripping of CD’s adds an additional £900 to the overall cost but is worth the investment if you buy a lot of CD’s or have a big library you wish to RIP onto the N100

For the overall build quality factoring in MELCO are manufacturing all their own parts for the N100, including their own dedicated mechanical hard drives, the overall user experience form factor and most important sound quality its very easy for us to award MELCO a Serious Performer award for their excellent N100. What’s even more interesting is there are better things coming for the N100 soon with a big update, more on that in the future.

A Special Performer Award is Pursuit Perfect Systems highest accolade and is in recognition of exceptional product performance regardless of price