Innuos Zenith SE MkII

[PhilR]

On 1/4/2018 at 2:17 PM, ADCO said:

My Zenith mII (standard) arrived just before xmas and is at this point as close to "burned in" as I would think it could be.

I came out of a fairly optimized Pc with Sotm card with separate power supply , The HD plex power supply for the mother board etc etc feeding a Micro rendu....and this sounded very good.

While all of this is purely subjective I have to tell you the Zenith is better in every way I can articulate ....I just cant get enough hours of music in now. And that is really what its all about, that and its the easiest dam thing ever to get up and running on Roon.

 

 

 

Agreed on all points of this with my own MK II. This is making the best music I have heard in my listening situation, after coming from an Aurender N-100 and Sonore Signature Rendu. The ease of set-up can't be overstated, this thing just works out of the box with minimal fuss. Mine has been running as a Roon Core unit and handles my 15TB NAS library with no issues. I have contacted Innuos with many questions regarding the unit and their customer service has been amazing. These guys really care about their products and customers.

 

From my interpretations of the reviews, the comparison of the standard MK II and the MK II SE seems to revolve around the phrase "A bit more..", as in the SE has a bit more detail, a bit more background blackness, a bit more instrument separation, etc.  I'm good spending half as much to get 95% of ideal, especially because my room has a higher ambient noise level that probably wouldn't let me discern that small difference between the two Zenith models.

[PhilR]

18 hours ago, rickca said:

It would be great if you could post your Q&A with Innuos.  I'm sure many others will have the same questions.

 

No problem.

 

My first exchange was about using the Zenith as a Roon Endpoint with a Sonictransporter i7 so I could do DSD upsampling in Roon (the DAC in my Lyngdorf TDAI goes up to DSD128). Here was my response: " I hope you know that you can use the Zenith as Roon Core too... You don't really need the SonicTransporter for that matter. Whilst the Zenith does not have a powerful enough CPU to do DSD Upsampling, we did find we preferred the Zenith as a single unit upsampling to 24/384 PCM than the Zenith acting as Roon bridge only with a separate server (i5) doing DSD upsampling" I went with their advice and currently upsample to 352.8/384 PCM in Roon. I briefly tried upsampling to DSD64 in Roon with the Zenith and it seemed to handle it with no issues. Had I ended up using the Sonictransporter as a core, I probably would have slightly higher access speeds, but the slight delays in searching for music in my library (2-3 seconds usually) are no issue for me. It wasn't too many years ago when we actually had to get off our butts and walk across the room to change a CD..

 

Second question was about the background analysis speed setting while Roon was importing the library info from my NAS. Here was my response: " You can up the background analysis speed to 4 cores for the initial scan to speed things up (I wouldn't advise playing music during this time as it will have an effect on the audio performance). Once that is complete I would change it back to throttled as this is more than adequate for smaller imports."

 

Next was a question about Spotify. Roon integrates automatically with Tidal, but I also have a Spotify account. Unfortunately you have to use the Zenith software to switch out of Roon mode and back into the Zenith playback software mode to use Spotify. It only takes a minute, but it is not a seamless process.

 

Then next question was about DSD playback. One day Roon started to automatically downconvert all of my DSD files to 384PCM. The native DSD playback option had vanished from the menu too. I spent some time trying to figure it out, and even went as far as posting on the Roon support forum for help. I had a few suggestions there, but not even the Roon techs could figure out what was happening. I assumed it was an issue with the Zenith and contacted them for help.Nuno opened up a remote support session with me and quickly determined that I had set Roon to control my playback volume via the Roon app instead of the volume control of my Lyngdorf. Using volume control via Roon DSP disables the Roon native DSD processing and that is exactly what I had done. Interesting that Roon support could not figure out the DSP volume issue, even though I gave them a screenshot of that particular setting, but Innuos customer support figured it out right away. Fantastic customer service!

 

My last question for them was about using optical isolation for the LAN input. I was told that they use an isolation transformer in the unit and didn't feel that additional isolation is necessary.

 

Keep in mind that I am not the original owner of this unit. My first contact with Innuos was to let them know that I had purchased a Zenith MK II second hand and wanted to do whatever necessary to get it registered in my name. I have had several experiences with companies who do not want to help owners of second-hand gear, but I am incredibly impressed and grateful that Innuos is not one of them.

 

[PhilR]

1 hour ago, BigAlMc said:

Forgive the crappy picture. My LG V30 sounds fantastic but the camera is pretty average. 

 

Top to bottom:

MKII (unplugged currently) 

Directstream DAC 

MKII SE (on and playing) 

 

Will give the SE at least 100 hours and then set up the MKII at the same time to try and A/B the two. Guess I'm in a fairly unusual position having both in the house at the same time. Need to return the MKII to the dealer in a couple weeks tho. 

 

That's fantastic, looking forward to your direct comparisons once the SE is broken in!