Streaming with Accuphase and Melco N1A

Streaming with Accuphase not possible? Yes, it is—and it's actually a lot of fun. We'll show you how.

by Olaf Adam

Accuphase was founded in 1972 in Yokohama and has since marked the pinnacle of Japanese high-end hi-fi. You shouldn't be fooled by the traditionally champagne-colored cases, nor by the labeling and displays in the charming 80s style. Accuphase constantly develops its products and technologies further and responds to all new trends in the market. For example, the Japanese have one of the best and most advanced D/A converters currently available in their lineup with the DC-37. So, to achieve fully digital hi-fi bliss, all that's really missing is a good streamer—but unfortunately, you won't find one at Accuphase. We experimented a bit and found a perfect playmate with the Melco N1A, which allows you to build an easy-to-use streaming solution with the unmistakable Accuphase sound.

Streaming with Accuphase DC-37

You can't help but smile a little when you see an Accuphase DC-37 in person for the first time. The case in champagne color (of course!), the (fake?) wood panels on the sides, the playful typeface of the model designation, and not least the anachronistic segment LCD displays on the left and right of the backlit Accuphase logo—the DC-37 wouldn't have looked out of place in dad's stereo tower in the seventies. But it's got a lot going on under the hood and is highly modern! The DC-37 is a top-class DAC or D/A converter that processes digital music up to DSD128 and PCM 384kHz/32 bit and transforms it into the finest analog sounds. The developers paid special attention to the playback of DSD or SACD. For this, the DC-37 adopts Accuphase's proprietary MDSD technology from the larger DC-901. A freely programmable FPGA chip performs upsampling of the incoming DSD signal and processes the signal with an elaborate moving average filter to enable almost noise-free D/A conversion. Each channel is handled by a 32-bit DAC with eight parallel circuits. When PCM signals are present, these DACs are addressed directly. The analog signal thus obtained is also treated with extreme care by the DC-37. The analog section has a completely independent power supply to avoid high-frequency interference from the digital section right from the start. The balanced and unbalanced signal paths inside the DC-37 are also completely independent and separately filtered. So you can confidently use both outputs simultaneously without having to worry about interference.

The streamer

The DC-37 has everything needed to convert a digital signal into the highest musical enjoyment. But apart from the well-known (and excellent) SACD players, Accuphase itself doesn't offer any digital sources. And simply connecting any random streamer to this high-quality DAC would be almost sacrilegious. So it made sense for us to look for the best possible digital source for this exceptional converter. And actually, the search was quickly over, because the Melco N1A almost imposes itself as the solution here.

Melco – Storage solution with audio tradition

First of all, the N1A is much more than a streamer and is primarily a digital music library. The development was initiated by none other than Makoto Maki, founder and chairman of Buffalo Inc., one of the world's leading manufacturers of hard drives and storage solutions. Makoto Maki has indulged his love for high-quality hi-fi for decades and founded his company (back then under the name Maki Engineering Laboratory Company – MELCO) as a hi-fi manufacturer. After introducing some highly regarded turntables, Melco's activities shifted increasingly toward audio components and accessories, and eventually toward computer peripherals and hard drives. While the brand name Buffalo became world-famous in this field, the parent company still operates under the name Melco Holdings.

Maki-san, of course, now has much more time for his hobby than before and has always kept up with the latest developments. Consequently, a few years ago, he approached his Buffalo engineers with the desire for a network hard drive. His only condition: the music storage should meet his audiophile sound requirements in every respect. To cut a long story short: the engineers quickly realized that their tried-and-tested, millions-sold standard models ran quickly and reliably, but left a lot to be desired in terms of sound. This was followed by about three years of intensive development work, during which they first had to find out why a network hard drive could have any effect on sound at all. The breakthrough finally came when Alan Ainslie, a true audio expert who had already worked intensively on music streaming over networks at Chord and Naim, joined the team.

The Melco N1 takes over streaming control in the network and provides the player or DAC with perfectly prepared data. As a result of this brilliant cooperation, the N1A and N1Z are now available as the first products under the Melco brand name in decades. The two mainly differ in the storage used (magnetic hard drives in the N1A, specially developed 'audiograde' SSD storage in the N1Z). The basic principle, however, is the same for both models. Put simply, the N1 takes control of all data traffic in the music network, sorts and checks the relevant data packets, and provides the music stream with extreme timing precision and thus free from jitter. This works best, of course, with music files stored internally. But the unique network technology of Melco even holds the potential to improve the sound of any digital music signal streamed through it. So your own music collection on an existing NAS benefits from the Melco sound just as much as the Spotify stream you play in the background.

In practice: Streaming with Accuphase and Melco

All of this is, of course, theory, and indeed quite complex once you delve into the technical details. What counts is practice. And our setup in Listening Studio 07 at AUDITORIUM Hamm quickly demonstrated the enormous sound potential of the combination of Accuphase DC-37 and Melco N1A. As described, the DC-37 is an excellent converter, and the Accuphase chain with Avantgarde Acoustic Trio speakers already sounded truly impressive before. But adding the Melco N1A as the source actually takes it to a whole new level.

This becomes especially clear when you feed the Accuphase electronics with very high-resolution music data that is only available as downloads and not on physical media. The combination of DC-37 and N1A is compatible with DSD files up to 5.6448 MHz (DSD128 = double the resolution of SACD) and PCM files up to 384kHz/32 bit, which is the best available studio master quality at present. To appreciate the enormous detail of such high-quality recordings, everything in the system has to be just right—and that's definitely the case here.

Operating the streaming system is easy, though it could be a bit more elegant. It is possible to select the tracks to be played directly on the Melco N1A's display, but this is cumbersome and not very up to date. Melco currently doesn't offer its own control app, so you have to use another UPnP application like the popular PlugPlayer. There you define the Melco N1A as both the source ("Server") and the player ("Renderer") and connect the Accuphase DC-37 via USB. As mentioned, this works, but it could be better. As a UPnP server, the Melco features a small but handy function: it allows you to sort or search the stored music data by format and resolution. This lets you quickly find the best tracks to push the system's capabilities to the limit.

Not pretty, but functional—control with the PlugPlayer app. High-resolution music streaming with Accuphase—it can be done, with truly stunning results!

More information:

Accuphase DC-37 and Melco N1A