Innuos Zen MK3 tips and tricks

First of all, congratulations: Innuos products are reliable, with great customer support and sound great!

A small group of my friends and I have been using various Innuos products for years including: Zen mini w LPS power supply, zenith SE and Statement Next Gen. I have actually re-ripped my entire CD collection after an initial import from an Aurender (all originally lossless apple files) re-ripped as WAV files using the Zenith. I also run a separate Roon Nucleus + and have a large NAS and have something like 8 TB of files (flac, WAV, DSD, and many, many high resolution files). We all use QoBuz but I have had Tidal as well in the past. I later re-ripped again all my CDs with Zenith into .flac files due to a great deal of experimenting and comparing. Following are results that all of us share in common:

1. Innuos Sense sounds better than Roon, in any of it’s formats (although Roon is at it’s best when files are upsampled to DSD) whether played direcly into dacs through USB or using Innuos as Roon endpoint. It is not necessarily a huge difference but we all find it to be significant and therefore choose Sense. (I am fortunate as with the Nucleus I can run both platforms and gain all of the user interface benefits of Roon, but I do all serious listening through Sense).

2. On all of our systems, apple files sound slightly inferior to either .wav or .flac files. .aiff is noticeably better than.ALAC.

3. .flac files generally sound slightly better than .wav files. We feel that the Innuos platform is optimized for .flac. Additionally you save about 30% of disc space due to lossless compression. Since I have the NAS with near unlimited storage space, I don’t care about this, however the improvement in .flac sound quality over .wav was significant enough for me to re-rip over 500 CDs!… for the 4th time! Ugh!!!

4.  Files coming in from NAS storage actually slightly outperforms files stored locally on the Innuos. Note that all of us have audiophile level switches and most of us are running separate linear power supplies for NAS and switches and using top of the line ethernet cables to “feed” the Innuos (I am using jcat m12 gold, others are using Nordost QNet with QSource power supplies) so if you don’t have all of these tweaks I don’t know if you will have same experience. It appears that removing the processing power of running the internal hard drives ever so slightly improves the Innuos’ sound.

5.  QoBuz sounds slightly better than same file types on Tidal. This difference is small and not 100% across the board but is consistent enough that most of us discontinued Tidal. Crazy as this sounds generally QoBuz sounds as good and sometimes even better than locally stored (internally or on NAS) stored files. This is not 100% of the time and sometimes even varies on same music.

6.   DSD files almost always sound better than any other format: streamed, Roon, local or otherwise.

In summary, I encourage you to do some comparing yourself but my recommendation would be to save the file space and rip files as lossless .flac for all of Innuos products. Good luck and have fun! I hope you get as much enjoyment out of your Innuos products as I have and I hope this experience is helpful to others.

Thanks for all the information.  Will try and see how it sounds in my system.  

Take time to try isolation under the chassis, I have found that makes a positive difference.  Also, 100% agree with comments about the Sense app sounding better than Roon. 

@koslekt1 +1

SortKones TC or even better Stillpoints make a big difference.

Also, very sensitive to Power Cable

Synergistic Research fuses.  I have Pink.

@bassbuyer If you look at the rear panel of the Zen Mini Mk3 you will see the DC inlet accepts 9-24v.

I have it on good authority that, if everything else were to stay the same, simply turning up the wick to provide a higher DC input voltage will run the circuitry in its sweet spot.

The stock wall wart produces 12v.

The Zen LPSU produces 16v.

Innuos would doubtless argue that a warranty is invalid if you use anything other than one of their PSUs (even a 12v or 16v from another manufacturer) but loads of people do.

I actually run mine with a customised LPSU producing around 21v ie. with around 10% safety margin, though one would imagine the 24v stated on the rear panel also has a margin of error of its own on top of that. It doesn't run physically hot at 21v ! My combo has been on 24/7 for over a year and continues to deilver faultless service and smiles.

This might be for further down the line but I thought I would share a potential upgrade path for you.