As beautiful as the files are, for the comparison between the internal and external converter I prefer to rely on one of the excellently recorded albums of the Living Concert Series: Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15. The recording with its abundance of spatial information clearly benefits from the second media converter - and the bandwidth limitation to 100 megabits? In any case, the stage seems a touch deeper and the rhythmic reproduction is a little more intense. The media converter built into the Melco is very good, the external one even a little better. Owners of the Melco S100 can thus reach the highest sound level in small steps.

Finally, the media converter integrated into the SotM switch also has to compete with the ADOT: Again, I start with the internal converter, after having enjoyed Jonas Hellborg's acoustic spectacle also via the SOtMs - the switch sNH-10G, the clock sCLK-OCX10 and the clock cable dBCL-BNC. This time I chose the Paul Motian Trio's "Folk Song For Rosie" from the album Le Voyage as the test file: Here the difference between the converters is even greater than with the Melco. With the internal one, the sound is not very homogeneous: The saxophone plays in a rather reverberant environment, the drums in a different room, and the bass was miked very close. With the ADOT converter, on the other hand, you can hear that especially during loud saxophone passages, the sound also spills over to the right, where the double bass seems to be. The spatial arrangement of the instruments seems more realistic, the strongly picked strings of the double bass have more energy, the hits on the cymbals are even more differentiated, and the saxophone comes with bite but without aggressiveness: simply great!