Innuos Zen next-gen vs. Pulsar for streaming...?

Not exactly what you are looking for but I recently went from Pulsar to Zenith Next Gen (so one step up from the Zen Next Gen).  Not night and day, but definite audible improvement in sound.  A little more presence and detail, but not fatiguing.  I would guess the Zen might have at least somewhat similar (if maybe a bit less significant) improvements, but without having heard it, I, of course, can’t really know.  I also wanted the built in server function to eliminate an external box and that works well.  Between trade up deal they were running a few months ago and trade on my prior server, I ended up with a reasonable (if still expensive) price.  I’m happy overall with the change.

Interesting @johnboston, so did your Zenith NG come with a drive to rip CDs or are you using it purely as a streamer? I see that you can buy it configured as a server or streamer? Can you give some insights to Sense 3? Are there differentiating user features or behavior or are the changes under the covers? Did you demo this at a dealer or did you buy it on blind faith? Thanks!

None of the NG machines come with a cd drive built in.  You can easily add one to one of the USB ports in the back.  I have ripped most of my music on CD already — so ripping isn’t a high priority for me.  I did buy a cheap LG dvd ripper (model number GP65NS60) that I used to rerip a couple of cds and it worked fine.  Follow the directions on Innuos’ website to get it set up — very easy.

You can configure the Zenith NG with built in SSD storage from Innuos or you can add it yourself later.  I got a 4TB drive pre-installed — more space than I’ll ever likely need, but it’s also easy to add a second drive if you want.  I had used a separate music server with the Pulsar and wanted to eliminate one box by combining the server/streaming function into a single box.

So, I both stream Tidal/Qobuz and play locally stored music through the Zenith.  No real differences in Sense 3 between the Zenith and the Pulsar in terms of functionality as far as I know other than the lack of ability to have internal music storage on the Pulsar.

No demo for me.  I did buy from a place I could have returned it, but I wasn’t expecting that to be the case.  I’ve been using Innuos machines for close to 10 years and each time I’ve upgraded I got better sound and good functionality.  And this is again the case with the Zenith NG.

Hope this helps

Thanks @johnboston, fills in a lot of blanks to the direction they are going. And yes, a home demo for something like this would be a must as I am one of the unfortunates @pinwa mentioned; my auditory memory stinks

@grannyring Excellent observations.  I moved from Zenith MK3 to Zenith NG and found very little SQ improvements.  I will say this it sounds much better running Roon than on the MK3.  I think that's because its processor is more powerful?