Innuos Zenith MKIII as Roon Core

[Christian_Schwaneka1 (Christian Schwanekamp)]

Hi Henry

@Henry_McLeod

What do you sacrifice on the alter of ultimate sound quality?

Personally, I have never sacrificed so little for better sound quality even though the operation is not perfect. And I can use Roon !

@Henry_McLeod

I have experimented with RAM playback on Roon endpoints and differences are minimal compared to conventional running in AudioLinux. Also Ropieee runs in RAM. This isn’t to do with endpoints. It has to do with the core and I think ties in to the way you use it as a USB host. The question is, if you do this across a network do you still get the gains?

That’s a good question.
I think that the better sound of Innuos besides the memory playback is simply due to the classic hifi attributes:

• High-quality power supply unit
• General shortest signal paths
• Core+Endpoint+Hard Disk in one device

Maybe even the fact that the processor unit is not so fast …

Nucleus or Antipodes CX

One last comment, just to provide some balance to some misleading comments here. The issue we find with many CPUs is not so much the clock rate itself, but where in its performance range you run it. Under-clocking improves the sound quality in our experience/opinion, but as the new CPUs get faster than the older ones, we find we can also clock them faster too and still get great sound. We never stated, as has been suggested, that a clock speed of 1.5GHz is necessary for good sound. It just i…