Streaming with Accuphase doesn't work? It works, and it's actually really fun. We show how.
by Olaf Adam
Accuphase was founded in Yokohama in 1972 and has been at the forefront of Japanese high-end hi-fi ever since. You shouldn't be fooled by the traditional champagne-colored housings or by the lettering and the displays in the charming 80s style. Accuphase is constantly developing its products and technologies and reacts to all new trends in the market. With the DC-37, the Japanese have one of the best and most advanced D / A converters currently in their range. All that is missing for fully digital hi-fi happiness is a good streamer, but unfortunately you won't find it at Accuphase. We tried around a little and found the perfect playmate in the Melco N1A, with which an easy-to-use streaming solution with the incomparable Accuphase sound can be set up.
Streaming with Accuphase DC-37
You have to smile a bit when you see an Accuphase DC-37 in person for the first time. The case in champagne color (logical!), The (wrong?) Wooden cheeks on the sides, the playful font of the type designation and, last but not least, the anachronistic segment LCD displays on the left and right of the backlit Accuphase logo - the DC-37 would be in Papa's stereo tower in the seventies also didn't attract attention. But he has it all behind his ears and very modern! The DC-37 is a top class DAC or D / A converter that accepts digital music with up to DSD128 and PCM 384kHz / 32 bit and converts it into the finest analogue sounds. The developers paid particular attention to the reproduction of DSD and SACD. The DC-37 adopts Accuphase's own MDSD technology from the larger DC-901. A freely programmable FPGA chip upsamples the incoming DSD signal and processes the signal with a complex filter with a moving average to enable almost noise-free D / A conversion. These in turn are handled by a 32-bit DAC with eight parallel circuits for each channel. If PCM signals are present, these DACs are controlled directly. The DC-37 is also extremely careful with the analog signal obtained in this way. The analog section has a completely independent power supply in order to avoid high-frequency interference from the digital area right from the start. The balanced and unbalanced signal paths inside the DC-37 are also completely independent of each other and are filtered separately. So you can safely use both outputs at the same time without fear of interference.
The streamer
The DC-37 has all the requirements to convert a digital signal into maximum musical enjoyment. But apart from the well-known (and excellent) SACD players, Accuphase itself does not offer any digital sources. And simply connecting any streamer to this high-quality DAC would be almost sacrilege. So it made sense that we started looking for the best possible digital source for this exceptional converter. And the search was actually over quickly, because the Melco N1A is the obvious solution here.
Melco - storage solution with audio tradition
First of all, the N1A is much more than a streamer, it sees itself primarily as 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 been indulging in his love for high-quality hi-fi for decades and founded his company (then under the name Maki Engineering Laboratory Company - MELCO) as a hi-fi manufacturer. After the introduction of some well-known turntables, Melco's activity shifted more and more towards audio components and accessories, and finally towards computer peripherals and hard drives. While the Buffalo brand name became world-famous in this area, the parent company continues to operate under the name of Melco Holdings. Maki-san now has a lot more time for his hobby than before and has always kept pace with the latest developments. So a few years ago he asked his Buffalo engineers for a network hard drive. The only condition: the music memory should meet its audiophile sound requirements in all respects. To cut a long story short: the engineers quickly realized that their tried and tested standards, which had sold millions of times, ran quickly and reliably, but left a lot to be desired in terms of sound. About three years of intensive development work followed, during which it first had to be found out why a hard drive in the network can have an acoustic influence at all. The breakthrough came when Alan Ainslie, a real audio man who had previously dealt intensively with music streaming via networks at Chord and Naim, was brought into the team. The Melco N1 takes over the streaming command in the network and provides the player or DAC with perfectly prepared data. As a result of this congenial cooperation, the N1A and N1Z are now the first products available under the Melco brand name for decades. The two differ essentially in the memory used (magnetic hard drives in the N1A, specially developed 'audio grade' SSD memory in the N1Z). The basic principle, however, is the same for both models. Simply put, the N1 takes control of all data traffic in the music network, sorts and checks the corresponding data packets and makes the music stream available with extremely precise timing and therefore free of jitter. Of course, this works best with music files that are stored in the internal memory. But the Melco's unique network technology even has the potential to improve the sound of any digital music signal that is streamed through it. So your own music collection on an existing NAS benefits from the Melco sound as well as the Spotify stream on the side.
In practice: Streaming with Accuphase and Melco
All of this is, of course, gray theory, and indeed quite complex if you go into the technical details. Practice is what counts. And our 'test setup' in the audio studio 07 of the 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 as speakers really didn't sound bad before. But the addition of the Melco N1A as a player actually raises the whole thing to a completely different level. This is particularly eye-catching when you feed the Accuphase electronics with very high-resolution music data that is only available as a download and not on a data carrier. The combination of DC-37 and N1A is compatible with DSD files up to 5.6448 MHz (DSD128 = double the resolution of the SACD) and PCM files up to 384kHz / 32 bit, i.e. the best studio master quality currently available. In order to appreciate the enormous depth of detail of such high-quality recordings, of course everything in the system has to fit, and this is definitely the case here. The operation of the streaming system is simple, but could be solved a little more elegantly. In principle, it is possible to select the pieces to be played directly on the Melco N1A display, but that is cumbersome and not very up-to-date. Melco does not currently offer its own app for control, so you have to use another UPnP application such as the popular PlugPlayer. There you define the Melco N1A both as a source ("server") and as a player ("renderer") and connect the Accuphase DC-37 via USB. As I said, it works, but beautiful is different. As a UPnP server, the Melco has a small but practical feature: It offers the sorting or search for the stored music data according to format and resolution. This enables you to find the best pieces in no time at all to exhaust the capabilities of the system. Not pretty, but functional - control with the PlugPlayer app. High resolution music streaming with Accuphase - so it works, and with really stunning results!
