Melco S100 Mk2 Network Switch

Since Melco launched the S100 in the Spring of 2019 it has become an incredibly popular product. I think it is fair to say that it exceeded my expectations both in terms of how popular it would be and also how effective it would be.  For those who have a good system and stream music using Tidal/Qobuz/Deezer/Roon or simply move around audio over your network (like using a NAS to serve a network player) the S100 just simply works, it improves the performance of your system and really helps to make a streamed music service a serious source in its own right.

Fast forward to late 2022 and Melco have announced a revised and tweaked version of the S100 and it now the S100 mk2

The original S100 had 8 ethernet sockets, 4 rated at Gigabit speeds and the other 4 sockets were bandwidth throttled to 100Mb – perfect for audio that doesn’t require anywhere close to the bandwidth of gigabit and by slowing it down you reduce noise and by doing that you improve performance.

With the S100 Mk2 Melco have decided to tweak the socket allocation – they have increased the number of Gigabit ports from 4 to 6 and the 100Mb ports have been reduced from 4 to 2. In reality most users would rarely have more than 1 or 2 items to connect to a 100Mb socket and it was always very easy to fill the 4 Gigabit ports (Roon Nucleus or NUC, Sky Box, Games Console, Router, Computer, Smart, so these reallocation makes a lot of sense.