The beginnings of Melco date all the way back to 1975 fuelled by the genuine hobbyist passions of enthusiast Makoto Maki. His undoubted masterpiece back then was the groundbreaking modular Melco turntable that set new standards in music reproduction.

When CD arrived and the popularity of the turntable declined, Melco under the brand “Buffalo Inc” turned their focus to the computer peripheral market and today’s company enjoys a value in excess of 1 Billion dollars. With so much success under his belt, Makoto Maki was free to return to one of his main passions and with a huge amount of R&D invested in Ethernet data switches, storage and NAS drives, it seemed fitting for him to tackle the problem of streaming and storage for Audiophile grade hifi systems.

The debut N1a and N1z music serves from Melco were true groundbreaking products. One box that stores all your music and plays it into your chosen DAC or CD player, all controlled by a simple app on your tablet, smartphone or computer/laptop. The Melco removes the computer element from your system, functioning as a high resolution storage and streaming device and the quality of the sound, the low noise floor and natural presentation is so very obviously superior to other solutions which have tried to corner this market.

In March 2017 the Melco range was revamped to Mk2 specification with a completely new Player/Renderer, lower noise floor, improved performance and even more storage. The best just got even better. Then in December 2019 the EX range was announced sporting new standards of Music library convenience, built in songkong and minimserver, full implementation of Internet Radio and Roon endpoint functionality.