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Innous Zenith MKII and Roon DSP

I purchased an Innous Zenith MKII about 6 months and configured it to use Logitech Media Server.  I had used LMS for whole house stereo for many, many years.  I finally decided to use Roon instead, and while Roon doesn't meet all of my whole house stereo needs, the interface and music management capabilities are far superior to LMS, IMHO. 

Before enabling Roon, I reached out to Innuos tech support about the fact that Roon does not list the MKII as a recommend device.  From Innous tech support, " The MkII can run Roon very well, the only reason they suggest such a high system spec is for performing DSD upsampling which is by far the most intensive process Roon has. For normal usage and bitperfect playback, the MkII can easily run Roon, no problems there."

I'm not doing any DSD upsampling.  I am trying to use Roon's DSP capabilities, but I've experienced dropouts when I do.  Other than this problem, I'm quite OK using Room with the MKII when playing DSD, FLAC, and WAV files through a MyTek Liberty DAC, as well as, streaming Tidal MQA directly to my NAD M12 BluOS module.

I want to take advantage of Roon DSP capabilities and keep the MKII.  I leaning towards buying an Intel i7 NUC to run Roon Core and strictly use the MKII as my network media player/NAS.  Thoughts anyone?
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david_ten
5,480 posts
 
@oldschool1948  That's terrific. Looking forward to hearing how it works out for you and within your system.

Should it meet or exceed your expectations and you decide to keep the unit, reach out. Happy to suggest ways to enhance additional performance gains.
oldschool1948's avatar
oldschool1948 OP
490 posts
 
Thanks for the offer.  I will certainly do that.  Did you experience any loss of SQ running Core on the sonicTransporter?
fsmithjack's avatar
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fsmithjack
712 posts
 
I will gladly pay you cash for it if you at some point want to move it. I have been thinking of trying one. 
Thanks 
oldschool1948's avatar
oldschool1948 OP
490 posts
 
@jsqt.   I'm not sure what you are using DSP for if you are not doing upsampling, but it is true that DSD upsampling is the most memory-intensive operation. EQ and headroom probably would not cause as many issues as the upsampling to DSD 64.
I want to experiment with DSP, in general, to see where it can take me.  With the Zenith alone, I was unable to do that.  With the sonicTransporter, I will certainly try upsampling. 

I've spent a lot of time reading Roon documentation and blog posts.  I realize I have A LOT to learn about the software, and with so many capabilities and options, I'll have to invest a fair amount time tweaking and comparing setting changes.  I'm kinda sorta retired so I have much more time on my hands these days to play with Roon and, hopefully, take my overall system SQ up a notch or two :-).


david_ten
5,480 posts
 
@oldschool48 "Did you experience any loss of SQ running Core on the sonicTransporter?" 

Not at all, with my i7 unit. Same with my previous gen i5 and i7 sonictransporters. Also, no hiccups running Roon Core on my current unit.
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