When you are looking for a way to comfortably manage your collection of digital music, enjoy it with the best sound quality possible and without the need to mess around with computers in your scarce spare time, the Melco N1A is just what you need.

Just nine years ago to include a computer into my Hi-Fi system was completely and utterly unthinkable. A short while later the arrival of the iPod suddenly forced me to rip my CDs and to start building an iTunes library. And when a DAC with USB input found its way into my rack it was an easy thing to connect that to my new iMac so that I could play part of my music collection with a lazy mouse click. Like using the iPod before, this had an unhealthy effect on my musical habits. Time and time again I found myself skipping through my collection, just playing one or two songs from a certain album, completely ignoring the fact that the recording artist might have seen the album as one piece of art, with each track purposefully located at exactly the position it needed to be in. If you need music to test gear a playlist made up of songs from various albums is fine. But especially with so called 'concept albums' tearing out one or two favourite songs border on sacrilege. Maybe someonewho grew up with the CD, remote control always ready in hand, might have a diff erent view on this. But as vinyl records played the major part in my musical socialisation, closely followed by a Metz tape machine, I have always despised skipping from title to title, even in the CD era. If that now changes with the iPod and the computer I can't blame the technologies for that. It's simply a lack of self-discipline, I guess.

But now for the Melco which arrived in my world in the form of the brand's representative Alan Ainslie. When Alan, General Manager Audio NAS with Buffalo Technology, Inc., first contacted me and asked for a meeting to introduce two new Network Attached Storage devices (or 'NAS' in computer-speak), I was tempted to delegate that meeting to a colleague more versed in streaming and network technologies than I am. Because I really prefer to send my digital music directly to the DAC via USB. But already during our first conversation Alan made it clear that the Melco units would work well in that 'simple' setup, effectively replacing the computer in the chain. So I invited him over to have a quick listen to his products. But it turned out differently because I soon realised that using that meeting to have a chat with Alan was much more interesting. After all, I would be able to listen to the product later, on my own.

Alan has a long track record in hi-fi. He used to sell Technics in the UK, worked for Chord Electronics, developed IP-based multiroom audio systems for Naim, sat on the board that defined the Red Book Standard for the The CD. He also had a hand in the multi-award-winning CD recordings of the London Symphonic Orchestra, Paul McCreesh and Andrzej Panufik. With this background, he's currently looking into the use of DSD as a download format, provided it's a carefully produced native file. As a reader of hifistatement.net this will ring a bell, and you'll be able to imagine that Alan and I had a lot to talk about.