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New flagship digital music library from Japan

PRICE: £7,000-£9,000 AVAILABLE: NOW WEB: MELCO-AUDIO-MASTERS.COM

JAPANESE SPECIALIST MELCO Audio has launched a new two-box digital music library, the N10/2, which it's describing as: "the best-performing Melco music library in the company's history”.

The N10/2 is available in either HDD (N10/2-H50) or SSD (N10/2-S38) guises, with the former a direct replacement for the original N10 and the latter supplanting the previous SSD flagship, the N1Z/2EX. The libraries centre around newly selected drives: 5TB in the N10/2-H50 and 3.84TB in the N10/2-S38. The N10/2 also benefits from a new high-performance PCB, first seen in Melco's limited-edition N10 45th Anniversary Limited Edition - now sold out.

The N10/2 is a two-box design, featuring a half-width (215mm) chassis, enabling the signal-processing electronics to be kept separate from the power supply. The 'head' unit contains the processing electronics and data connectivity, while the power unit has a low-noise linear power supply with toroidal transformer.

The company says that the head unit uses the same low-noise, high-precision digital music dataflow as its existing series and benefits from several familiar Melco USPs. The rear panel features twin Ethernet ports - LAN and Player - the latter being a dedicated port designed to connect directly to network streamers without the need for an intervening data switch. There are also twin USB 2.0 ports, plus a further front-panel USB, operating as a dedicated DAC output. The second USB port is for hook up to HDD/SSD and CD drives (CD rippers'), capacity expansion with Melco's E100 (or other) storage drive and easy backup to HDD/SSD drives.