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Innuos Zenith SE MkII


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should work

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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12 hours ago, mikicasellas said:

 

Funny i am demoing the Bricasti M5 right now and i am wondering if getting the MKII would be a better than the M5, iam between one of those two choices, never thought the option of combining them only compare them to see which one is better..

 

the M5 has not yet arrived ( il will come together with the Innuos ) .    the reseller advised me to have a dedicated streamer and a dedicated server even if the innuos works very good by itself... he obtained better results with streamer  starting price at 3 k€ (he doesn't sell Bricasti).

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Zenith SE owners:

I am finding that with version 1.3.2, the native player is unconditionally transcoding all DSD to 352.8 FLAC. It does not change even if I set the DSD flag from transcode to native.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? It was working fine before in 1.3.1.  I should clarify that my DAC only accepts DoP, but the SE was correctly sending DoP even with the DSD flag set to Native. (There is no DoP flag). 

 

I've emailed support.

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On 1/20/2018 at 12:08 PM, austinpop said:

Yes, there are some minefields in getting Roon up and running on the Zenith. There are actually 3 logical stages to this:

  1. Physically copy music over to the Zenith SE's internal SSD
  2. Bring up Roon correctly on the Zenith SE, by restoring from a database backup of your existing Core
  3. Fixup the music location under Roon > Settings > Storage

Do the following first, on your existing Roon Core server:

  • Make a backup to something you can access on the SE - a network share, or even a USB stick.
  • Go to Roon > Settings > Storage and note down where your music is currently stored.
  • Let's assume your current Roon Core is on a Windows machine named WinRoon, and your music is in E:\MyMusicLib

Let't take each in turn.

  1. Physically copy music over to the Zenith SE's internal SSD
    • The key pitfall here is to avoid the Auto-Import at all costs!
    • On the machine WinRoon, open the Zenith network share, and copy the folder MyMusicLib into the Music folder on the Zenith
  2. Bring up Roon correctly on the Zenith SE, by restoring from a database backup of your existing Core
  3. Fixup the music location under Roon > Settings > Storage
    • You'll see the previous location you had there - [E:] MyMusicLib is broken. Right click and "Disable" it.
    • The Roon Core on Zenith will already have the Music folder enabled by default.
    • This should work. I say should, because in my case, my music was on a NAS. This was much cleaner and easier to bring up.
    • After the restore, I went to the NAS link in Storage, and selected Edit, then Browse. Since my NAS requires login creds, I had to essentially recreate the storage path to my music folder on my NAS.
    • Since then I have been selectively moving a few albums over into the Music folder, to assess "local vs. NAS" performance, but I have not yet done a wholesale copy of my (1.7TB) library over.
    • Advanced tip: by default Innuous locks you out of setting any other local storage location in Roon, but upon request, they can open up other folders for you.

In summary, don't be afraid to start over, using the steps above. It should go a lot cleaner.

 

I wanted to come back and update this advice after having finally done this successfully. Here are my updated instructions.

 

Before starting, contact Nuno at Innuos support and have him do a remote session to unlock the local SSD as a selectable storage location in Roon. This is very important!

 

Now, there are 3 logical stages to the migration:

  1. Physically copy music over to the Zenith SE's internal SSD
  2. Bring up Roon correctly on the Zenith SE, by restoring from a database backup of your existing Core
  3. Fixup the music location under Roon > Settings > Storage

Do the following first, on your existing Roon Core server:

  • Make a backup to something you can access on the SE - a network share, or even a USB stick.
  • Go to Roon > Settings > Storage and note down where your music is currently stored.
  • Let's assume your current Roon Core is on a Windows machine named WinRoon, and your music is in E:\MyMusicLib

Let't take each in turn.

  1. Physically copy music over to the Zenith SE's internal SSD
    • The key pitfall here is to avoid the Auto-Import at all costs!
    • On the machine WinRoon, open the Zenith network share, and copy the folder E:\MyMusicLib over to the Music folder on the Zenith.
    • Note: once this completes, the full path to your music folder in the SE is /storage/Music/MyMusicLib
  2. Bring up Roon correctly on the Zenith SE, by restoring from a database backup of your existing Core
  3. Fixup the music location under Roon > Settings > Storage
    • You'll see the previous location you had there - [E:] MyMusicLib. Obviously, it's meaningless on the Zenith.
    • Click on the 3 vertical dots next to this location, and select Edit.
    • On the next screen, hit Browse
    • Now navigate to your music on the local SSD. That will be at /storage/Music/MyMusicLib
    • Select, and save. At this point, you'll see Roon scanning your files
  4. Verify everything works. In my case, it worked perfectly. My library looked exactly as it had, and all my playlists, play counts, Date Added etc were all as before.

The real trick to this is to get Nuno to unlock the SSD in Roon, so you can actually Edit your existing storage location, and change the location by browsing to /storage/Music/MyMusicLib. The current default of just having Music be a non-navigable location in Roon does not work well. There is a difference between editing your existing music storage location, rather than disabling it, and enabling another location.

 

I'm going to point Nuno to this post and ask him to consider providing a navigable storage option in Roon in future updates of their system.

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Hello AustinPop. I should receive a SE on Monday and my main usage is with Roon.

i use today a PC with passive cooling and linear power supply as Roon server. 

What i understand from your post is that there is no possibility to select from Roon Core (the server) installed on the Zenith to select the folders that should be imported/managed through Roon ? If it is the case for the local SSD I think it should be the same for folders on a NAS : no possibility to use folded on a NAS through smb, cifs or nfs sharing.

did I understand well ?

BR

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2 minutes ago, Patatorz said:

Hello AustinPop. I should receive a SE on Monday and my main usage is with Roon.

i use today a PC with passive cooling and linear power supply as Roon server. 

What i understand from your post is that there is no possibility to select from Roon Core (the server) installed on the Zenith to select the folders that should be imported/managed through Roon ? If it is the case for the local SSD I think it should be the same for folders on a NAS : no possibility to use folded on a NAS through smb, cifs or nfs sharing.

did I understand well ?

BR

 

No I did not mean to suggest that. Yes, you can select a folder on a network share (SMB) with no problem. 

 

The current limitation is on is the local SSD. It is exposed as just the Music folder, not as a drive into which you can navigate. Like I said, you can have Nuno unlock the drive in Roon, but I have asked them to make it the default.

 

We’ll see.

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I have loaned an Innuos Zenith SE and  set it up as intended but also tried the connection with ethernet to my SMS-200ultra/SPS-500 combo.
In this case I have set  Ipeng to "SMS-200 USB as actual player" I see the Zenith music database  and the sound seems warmer and more open althoug some of the special character of the Zenith is lost.
I have not seen reports from other members so far.
I am new to Network players and do not understand what is the Zenith and what is the SMS-200 contribution to the sound?
 

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You can get a 4TB Zenith SE called an XL.  It's a lot more expensive.   

Pareto Audio AMD 7700 Server --> Berkeley Alpha USB --> Jeff Rowland Aeris --> Jeff Rowland 625 S2 --> Focal Utopia 3 Diablos with 2 x Focal Electra SW 1000 BE subs

 

i7-6700K/Windows 10  --> EVGA Nu Audio Card --> Focal CMS50's 

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I’m now into the fourth week with my Zenith SE and I’m really enjoying it.  I’ve currently got it connected to my Chord DAVE via an  ISO Regen (LPS-1) and will be adding a Chord Blu 2 to the mix when that arrives in 4-6 weeks.  I will probably also try a tx-USBultra to compare to the IR (I’ve also ordered an SR4).

 

Up until now I have not been that interested in delving too deeply into the various setting options on the Zenith, content as I was to just play my imported music under control of iPeng.  But now that I have started looking I find myself intrigued by the low latency mode option, which supposedly gives better sound quality on compatible dacs.  Well, I’ve tried it and music is still playing, so I guess my dac is compatible but I can’t say I notice any clear difference in sound quality.  Can some kind soul with more technical knowledge than me explain why Innuos would expect this option to give better sound quality?  Cheers

Zenith SE > USPCB (5v off) > tX-USBultra 9V (SR4) > Sablon Reserva Elite USB > M Scaler > WAVE Stream bnc > DAVE > Prion4/Lazuli Reference > Utopia/LCD-4/HE1000se

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Has anyone else migrated to 1.3.2? The internal player is not really working for me on 1.3.2.
 
As you know, I finally did my migration of content to the local SSD, so the amount of music in the Zenith is now significant. I have ~1250 albums, with about 40% of the SSD capacity in use.
 
The basic issue is I cannot get iPeng9 to display and play my library. If I select Albums, I do eventually get an album list displayed, but then if I select an album, iPeng will just hang with a "working" cursor, but never display the tracks. It gets worse. If I select genres, I will get the list of genres, but selecting any one also hangs.
 
So basically, the internal player is unusable. I don't know if this is related to the size of my library (hardly THAT big), or the new version of squeezelite in 1.3.2. I have tried all of these actions to no avail:
  1. Rebuild index on SE
  2. Rescan library on SE
  3. Flush cache on iPeng9
None of these change the behavior. I even let the SE alone overnight on the premise that it was indexing all the artwork, creating thumbnails, etc, but even after 24 hours, the behavior is the same.
 
Again, this is not critical for me, as Roon works fine as before, but just wondered if others, who use the internal player, have seen this behavior.
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4 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

Not really. I've played with that setting, and can't say it made any difference - but then I have tX-USBultra in the path.

 

Thanks.  And I have the ISO Regen (might change to tx-USBultra in the future).  So it seems no extra SQ jump to look forward to from that option.

 

1 minute ago, austinpop said:
Has anyone else migrated to 1.3.2? The internal player is not really working for me on 1.3.2.
 
 
 
Again, this is not critical for me, as Roon works fine as before, but just wondered if others, who use the internal player, have seen this behavior.

Glad I have not yet upgraded to 1.3.2 as that would be critical to my current usage.  I’ll hold back on the upgrade until Innuos can reassure.  

 

The only problem I had was on the first day when I tried to import music files from my NAS.  Innuos support couldn’t find a solution that worked for me so I just copied everything into the auto import folder.

Zenith SE > USPCB (5v off) > tX-USBultra 9V (SR4) > Sablon Reserva Elite USB > M Scaler > WAVE Stream bnc > DAVE > Prion4/Lazuli Reference > Utopia/LCD-4/HE1000se

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3 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

It doesn’t. Not sure how you fit 6TB of music on a 2TB drive?

 

what am I missing?

A music server should be around for a long time, and a music libary does tend to go. At the moment, the disk size of my library is just under 3TB, 2.46TB. An allowance of at least double for the future should be taken into account. The largest drive Innuous offers is 4TB, that won't fit plans. Roon has the ability to collect data from multiple shares on the network or attached drives to the server. From really early days, Gordon Rankin recommended to store music files on a 'large pipe' as he called it, PCIe is such a pipe. Ethernet, USB Drives are smaller pipes, the main problem with them is extra noise transmissions and reliability of portable drives for 24/7 use in plastic enclosures that cook drives rather than cool them.

 

AS Profile Equipment List        Say NO to MQA

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59 minutes ago, austinpop said:
Has anyone else migrated to 1.3.2? The internal player is not really working for me on 1.3.2.
 
As you know, I finally did my migration of content to the local SSD, so the amount of music in the Zenith is now significant. I have ~1250 albums, with about 40% of the SSD capacity in use.
 
The basic issue is I cannot get iPeng9 to display and play my library. If I select Albums, I do eventually get an album list displayed, but then if I select an album, iPeng will just hang with a "working" cursor, but never display the tracks. It gets worse. If I select genres, I will get the list of genres, but selecting any one also hangs.
 
So basically, the internal player is unusable. I don't know if this is related to the size of my library (hardly THAT big), or the new version of squeezelite in 1.3.2. I have tried all of these actions to no avail:
  1. Rebuild index on SE
  2. Rescan library on SE
  3. Flush cache on iPeng9
None of these change the behavior. I even let the SE alone overnight on the premise that it was indexing all the artwork, creating thumbnails, etc, but even after 24 hours, the behavior is the same.
 
Again, this is not critical for me, as Roon works fine as before, but just wondered if others, who use the internal player, have seen this behavior.

 

Update - Nuno gave me a way to fix this problem. I had to drop down into the web UI (<SE's IP>:9000) of the LMS (Logitech Media Server), which is the actual server running on the SE, from which the internal player pulls. I went into LMS settings, and did a "clear library and rescan," which cleared things right up.

 

He did confirm that the DSD issue I was seeing - where all DSD is transcoded to 352.8 - was something they were aware of and working on a hotfix.

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