@grannyring , thanks, I’ve seen that link from Innuos and am clear what to get; I’m more wondering what to try for my other stuff (one at a time though). I can guess it may be hard to get Gryphon to provide a recommendation of a aftermarket fuse for my Diablo amp, as I’m fairly certain they will just say not to do that. Could be the same with Mola Mola and Grimm too.
Great to see this thread generating some awareness of the MU1 and also now the Muon filter too!
I’m planning to switch back to my Innuos gear this weekend, for the sake of comparing and contrasting. I have to say that even if I end up preferring the MU1, which I expect will be the case (pending the expected positive impact of the Purple Fuse on my Zenith which may change things?), my overall opinion of Innuos has only increased, as I now have an understanding of what the three Innuos boxes do very well together. Before, I had no perspective other than the Mac Mini I was using earlier than 2019.
I have a soft spot for Innuos now that I didn’t have before. The sound is wide open, super-relaxed, highly dimensional with upper mids and high frequencies “popping out” holographically, with an emphasis on lower end fullness and upper mids and high frequencies. Altogether it’s a very welcoming and easy to listen to sound. In many ways the MU1 is a bit of the inverse - pace seems faster, more snap and solidity to the sound, more texture, more detail, more clarity, more precision, more focus, and absolutely no bloom. The MU1 is far more “to the point”. Ultimately through cabling, the Muon filter, and a bit of other tweakery I am aiming to get a bit of the Innuos’ fullness and enveloping dimensionality in the MU1 along side all of its excellent qualities. But we’ll see what that Purple Fuse does with the Innuos Zenith!l Mk3! As an aside, it occurred to me that how I have described the Innuos sound is similar to how I’ve seen others describe the Antipodes K50. That makes me very curious as to how the K50 would compare. But unfortunately I don’t think I’ll get to go that far with this particular journey, as much as I’d like to! If I had a trusted friend with a K50 I’d offer to swap with the MU1 for a a few weeks. Sadly I have no such friend with a K50!
In comparison I found the Aurender N20 to be “closed in” sounding on the top end - ultimately I was a bit disappointed in the N20 but that is probably just my system/room/ears. I know a lot of people love the N20. I do recall it had an insane degree of tonal density and saturation which made the sound very tangible, as well as this inky blackness effect which I would compare to the effect of conditioners. So it definitely had some great qualities. I know I may have loved it with the addition of a master clock, as it’s one of the few streamers that have a clock input. But for me it was hard to go down that path when I couldn’t figure out a way to be happy with its “base” sound.