The Innuos Zen is a truly remarkable unit, elevating the performance of your music collection. Now on the third iteration, the Zen delivers a wonderfully full and dynamic listen to you system.
Customer built motherboards are at the heart of its operation, these are power by dual linear power supplies with ultra-low noise regulators to deliver a clear wonderfully transparent sound.
This is a very focused unit the Zen Mk3 does not have either analogue or electrical digital output, it has only USB connection directly to the DAC of your choice. This focus ensures that the Zen Mk3 delivers the optimum performance via the USB as no other conversation stage is required.
The Zen MK3 also has a huge 8GB or memory, 4GB of which is used to purely cache the audio playback, this means that the music is not pulled directly from a hard drive and it limits the amount of time the hard drive needs to be spooling, further reducing the internal noise within the Zen Mk3.
The unit has been designed with maximum performance in mind, from the chassis to even the asymmetrical placement of feet done to enable the Zen to deliver the best possible sound.
At its heart runs InnuOS the proprietary customer written software that runs the Zen. This software is so very carefully written and designed above all else to ensure that the sound quality is the very best it can be. Controlled via their custom app you are able to monitor exactly what the Zen is doing, be it watch it rip a CD or edit the metadata to fit your custom requirements, you can import music that you have already ripped or purchased elsewhere and allow the Innuos system to optimise the music to offer the very best sound.
Ripping of CD's can be done to either WAV or FLAC whichever is your preference, it can be as simple as just pop the CD into the Zen and away it goes, ripping a perfect copy of your CD, all the album artwork, the track names, the artist names all pulled down from the internet. However there maybe times you want to closely watch what the Zen does, a great example of this is classical music, using Assisted Ripping allows you great initial control over the naming of the albums, if you'd prefer that it was by composer or by the conductor or even orchestra you are in control!
Innuos are very focused on the sonic ability of their products, this end all Innous products are fanless this ensures not only super quiet running but a fan is a very noisy inefficient drain on a power supply that will push noise back into the crucial audio circuits.
As streaming is becoming a bigger part of our music consumption, Innous has built-in support for Tidal and Qobuz to allow you to easily mix your music with music from streaming services*
*Subscriptions required.
Innuos also offers the ability to serve music around your home, so if you have other network devices that can play music in your home you are able to play music stored on your Innuos directly to them, as long as they are UPNP ready that's all that is needed.