Trying to Decide on my next Purchase

Oldschool we sell a lot of music streamers, and the NAD is a good capable product but there are way better units out there. 

The NAD is great if you are interested in setting up a NAD Blue Sound streaming setup and also like the idea of having a back up drive.

The Blue Sound Operating system is truly fantastic.

We sell the NAD, we also sell Aurender, Lumin, Baetis, Innuous, Naim. 

Our current favorite for the price is the Innous Zenith which offers some wonderful qualities:

1: True Audiophile build quality with a very sophisticated low noise power supply which generates a very clean digital signal, and yes you can hear the difference.  Low clock noise, ethernet isolation filter, proprietary OS which is designed to eliminate noise, vibration shock mounting. 

2: Easy to setup

3: Roon Core 

All the main servers use an app to run them.  There is just too much to control and access in terms of using and selecting files to make a regular remote effective. 

Personally the ability for a server to play a cd rather than rip is not a major issue the Innuous rips in eight mins, and automatically updates your library. 

I would not consider a server just because it is an NAD product, we sell the Masters products and they do stand on their own merits and you can use whatever server you find acceptable.

Food for thought.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

@audiotroy 

Nice informative post Troy

Dave and Troy,

Thanks for the prompt response and advice.  In your opinion, is the Innous Zenith SQ noticeably better than the 50.2?   Can you answer my NAD questions :-)

Base on your recommendation and reviews on this site, I will definitely give the Innous Zenith serious consideration.  

Roon is not a consideration.  I tried it and it's great software, but LMS fits my needs well enough.  I have over 16K music files on my NAS with 25 custom playlists of my favorite jazz and old school R&B artists.  I have about 1200 vinyl albums, about 1000 CDs, and a couple of cases of 10-inch reels.  I still, occasionally, rip a vinyl album or song to add to my collection; play a single CD or album; or play a reel when I want to back to the glory days!

Thanks again for the advice.

Regards,

Johnnie

The Innuous is way better sounding then the NAD in our tests a $3,500.00 Zenith MK II came quite close to the $15k Baetis Ref, however, their have been a score of improvements in the current Baetis that pushes that unit up even further in the reference class food chain.

The difference in digital severs is quite spooky and quite honestly we don't really understand why there is so much difference between digital sources but there are. 

The Innous is designed to run Roon, got no idea what you mean by LMS fits my needs well enough. Roon is one of the best music management softwares out there and you can do extensive playlist creation.

If its any considertion we have an nice eight bay QNAS with 21TB in a raid 5 configuration, and yes we still play vinyl, very rarely we will actually spin a CD we do have one of the world's best CD/SACD players the T+A PDP 3000.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ