Hi. I am glad you are enjoying your InnuOS gear. My experience is different. As they say, “horses for courses”. But some clarifications:
The Zenith Mk3 has an Ethernet input. Not an Ethernet switch.
I don’t rip CDs. So that feature is of no use to me.
The service is no more responsive than other companies I have dealt with.
Well designed? I have had two PhoenixUSB units fail on me. So I don’t agree.
As for bugs, I think if you ran an experiment and built a NUC10 i7 w/32GB RAM and 256 GB hard drive for less than $900 as compared to thousands for Innuos gear (which I did own and sold) I think you will realize that Roon bugs aren’t the problem. The problem is that Innuos gear is not powerful enough to run Roon properly. Period. I have proven this myself. Not speculation.
But if you are happy. That’s great. It’s a hobby. For me Innuos was a rip off. I would rather spend those thousands on gear that actually is worth it.
As for Roon. It is a bargain for music discovery and operates on top of Tidal and Qobuz, works with MQA and does DSP.
What does “for the moment” you are not using Roon “anymore” mean? Anymore for the next 2 days?
Enjoy the Innuos gear. But I feel obliged to let folks know that in my personal experience with both an Zenith Mk3 + PhoenixUSB and a NUC + separate streamer, that the former is not worth the money and is not built to properly run Roon. Maybe this is why Roon doesn’t work with Innuos in the first place.
It’s good everyone is happy with his equipment and that’s the most important
For the phoenix I do not see its interest, I discussed with Audiomat and as the designer explained to me if the DAC is well designed a Phoenix is useless, in the opposite case…?
As I said Roon is for me a simple discovery tool without more.
Ok, to make Roon work you need powerful hardware I understood that and no problem with that. I ran Roon core on my iMac Pro (64GB of memory, Intel Xeon processor…) I think it’s enough, connected to the network by a powerful wifi Mesh then in playback a Roon ready device that is the SOTM NEO 200 and the Innuos is better in rendering (only since V2).
It’s a simple remark and I don’t understand that the Roon team doesn’t think to try? systematically the answer is that the material is not powerful enough, and it’s good I understood
So, as I have no desire to change my hardware and nobody wants to compare Roon and Innuos sense, the discussion is dead end. I have compared and for me Innuos is better, that is as far as it goes.
I don’t use Roon since 10 days and I will continue not to use it until another update.
Your comparison was with Innuos V2? because before, listening from ipeng for example was nothing exceptional?
About the Ethernet inputs and outputs, there are two ports, which makes it possible to eliminate a switch and to use the second port of the Innuos to connect a network card for example.
All this remains anyway only audio material that must be matched with all the other elements…
I dont understand your coments you make out that everyone has a problem with roon.
I for one do not, i have a zen mini and using it as my roon core and could not be happier with roon.
The speed, the sound quality etc just brill as my opInion
The one improvement I can see is that the use of iPeng is eliminated which IMO is good. That app was not very good IMO. However, the Innuos Sense/InnuOS 2.0 looks like it is not close in development and robustness to Roon. But if your priority is Roon, like it is mine, the Zenith hardware, again per my experience, is under powered to run Roon with DSP and without Roon Remote crashing. But if you like Innuos that’s great. If you want to rip CDs then obviously InnuOS 2.0 has the advantage. But don’t rip CDs and I have moved on, and I am happy.
Hello. I will stay with the Innuos material because it is easy to use and provides other useful functions. I will run Roon core on another computer. I’m even thinking of selling my Sotm hardware and replacing it with a zen mini for a second headphone listening system. This way I would have two Roon end points, and two Innuos sense since it is possible to send music to different Innuos devices.
Nice day
The iOS app doesn’t store playlists. They are stored in the Core. So I have no idea how that happened. If you mean that the current Queue disappeared, then that is to be expected, but a playlist doesn’t reside on a Control device.
That’s far from what happened to me, powering a Nucleus+ with an upgraded Sean Jacobs DC3. I got a tremendous all-round improvement. I’ve not found anything that beats this combination yet.
@jean_luc_Fere That sounds like a great solution. I think the Innuos gear make excellent Roon endpoints. My only complaint with them was as a Roon Core. Enjoy.
When it comes to the sound, Innous Sense simply beats Roon out in the first round - I own an Innous mini.
I am not going to brag about the Innous Sense app, it definitely needs improvements.
And it’s not that Innous is a bad product to use when using Roon. When I bought the Innous and switched from using a PC to Innous the sound was definitely improved.
When it comes to 1.8, I can not see any change in performance, but all my albums with classical music are now just a mess and for some reason only the classical albums.
I have been using Roon for 5 or 6 years and it worked fine until 1.8, but I think it’s time for a break.
The sound wins over the functionality,
Finally I notice two problems. Innuos is not powerful enough to run the core, we can also translate that by the fact that the power necessary to Roon is due to the numerous functionalities offered by the application which requires a lot of resources thus a consequent work of the processor and as we know the more a processor works the more it emits disturbances. Separating the Core is therefore certainly a good thing.
Remain the sound rendering which is better with Sense. To have separated the Core from the endpoint I notice that it not changes the rendering of Roon, therefore there is indeed an improvement during a listening with Sense.
Innuos remains for my part a
Good choice since it is not closed to only one possibility and choice of reading.
As it is impossible to resell your Roon license, you might as well buy a new one to take advantage of all that you can in terms of quality
I did a little network flow experiment.
I chose a song and played it with Audirvana and Roon from my iMac Pro.
With Audirvana, the song loads quickly (30,40Mo) and I get 25 549 packets received for 209 sent. When the song ends, there is no more network activity.
With Roon (I had taken care that my database was well up to date before starting the test), the song loads progressively, I get a roughly equivalent number of received packets but for the sent packets I am at more than 8500 ???
Once the song is finished, Roon continues to consume network. I let it do for two minutes and more than 40 000 packets received and more than 10 000 sent ???
Roon phones home on a regular basis to check on the metadata held in your local database with what’s known by Roon in the cloud. Roon Labs also gathers analytics on how you use Roon (see the Privacy Policy)
It’s way too busy though, it really should be able to do this in downtime or set a time for it to do all these updates when your not using it overnight. You don’t need it doing it all the tirne, how often does metadata change. Analytics can also be uploaded in this down time. Having it do it all the time is half the reason people have issues with playing back material on some networks.
I understand better now the network problems and the improvement of Roon when the internet speed was multiplied. Indeed, better management in the background of this type of event would be more judicious and would leave room for certainly more comfort of listening.
I’m going to leave Roon for a while and will come back in a few months to see if things have changed.
Agree completely with this. Batching some actions would cut down on the number of database corruptions, at least the ones caused by power failures.
That and the simple action of taking a checkpoint before any critical database operation would probably prevent most of the on going database corruption issues.
No idea what’s happening on your system, but on my ROCK/NUC I see a batch check lasting about 20 minutes roughly every 24 hours… And I do have decent internet speeds (200 mbs up and down), so I’m not affected even if there’s streamed music playing…
I have no comments - people are entitled to their opinions. It’s however untrue we don’t support TIDAL - as you know it’s there and available on the platform. We are doing direct integration with TIDAL as we speak. Support for MQA is being placed on our feedback zone for users to vote on the feature so we know what kind of priority we should take. What I don’t see the point is if someone is using Roon, why do they care about what innuOS offers or not - they will not be using it when using Roon…
Best Regards,
Nuno Vitorino
R&D Director
I’m finding it advantageous to use both Roon and InnuOS 2.0.5 for now. Wish there were a stripped-down Roon version for listening to streaming without frequent “check-backs” and other high overhead internet-based processes alluded to by Simon above. A minimalist listening, SQ-optimized mode to decrease computational demands. For now, Innuos Sense wins on SQ for this Innuos Zenith SE owning listener. Roon wins on archiving, music discovery and recovery.
Without Tidal Masters, Tidal streaming is effectively useless to me and many others. And if you’ve noticed from the complaints of the anti-MQA crowd, Tidal are listing many more MQA files now, especially following the release of the Sony archives. Masters are one of the main ways Tidal differentiate themselves as a streaming service.
Innuos offer Roon and Roon/Squeezelite Experimental mode. As anyone familiar with them knows, Experimental mode sounds far better than Roon server/Roon player. But Experimental mode is buggy and will not be fixed as Nuno says it’s down to Roon and not fixable by Innuos. The bugs in Experimental mode make it effectively impossible to A/B two files or tracks, i.e. play ~ 20 seconds of one and switch back and forth to compare, as the player skips, drops track, or stops play and needs rebooting when tracks are manually stopped in the middle. This is something I have to do frequently (work).
