Has anyone compared Innuos/Chord streaming versus Naim CD players

Posted by: ct on 18 September 2018

I'm looking for a new source for my Nac72>Hicap>NAP180>SBLs which in time may go active and am torn between the convenience and possible future proofing of Innuos Zen with a Chord Qutest Dac but for a similar amount of investment a 2 year CDX2 is a possibility

Has anyone tried these two sources side by side and can give an opinion of the quality of sound quality please as this is my primary focus?

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by Timo

I haven’t compared Innuos/Chord Qutest with Naim CD player. But I have tried Innuos with the Qutest — sounded great but the focus of the exercise was on the user interface. In the end I decided against Innuos, as it restricts you to Squeezelite apps (iPeng for iPad and Orangesqueeze for Android are the most popular), unless recent products have changed this. Innuos supports Roon but the Innuos machines don’t have the best computer spec. When I checked it, Innuos did meet Roon recommendations...

In my view, Allo DigiOne (the regular one or the Signature version) offer greater flexibility as a transport for a standalone DACs.

Sorry this doesn’t answer your question — but hopefully it’s nonetheless useful.

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by Suzy Wong

Plenty of nDACs available in the usual places at the moment. Then a hundred quid’s worth of Raspberry Pi with a Digi board (IQAudio, HifiBerry, Allo, etc) will get you going.......while you save up for an ND555

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by sjw

I'm really rather pleased with my innuos mini into 202/200 and Ovator 400.

plays music nicely and I am not techy enough to use raspberry pi players.

I'm not really interested in servers Roon etc

Go have a Demo side by side

Cheers

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by hifi-dog

Timo posted:
I haven’t compared Innuos/Chord Qutest with Naim CD player. But I have tried Innuos with the Qutest — sounded great but the focus of the exercise was on the user interface. In the end I decided against Innuos, as it restricts you to Squeezelite apps (iPeng for iPad and Orangesqueeze for Android are the most popular), unless recent products have changed this. Innuos supports Roon but the Innuos machines don’t have the best computer spec. When I checked it, Innuos did meet Roon recommendations...
In my view, Allo DigiOne (the regular one or the Signature version) offer greater flexibility as a transport for a standalone DACs.
Sorry this doesn’t answer your question — but hopefully it’s nonetheless useful.

I use innuos zen mini with Roon both with a chord dac so it was core and endpoint in one and it had no problems at all . It got glitchy if loads if dsp was used but the chord dac was sooo much better running the native stream. I now use the zen mini as my Roon Core with nova as the endpoint

sound wise the chord was way more explicit and detailed with superb resolution and dynamics.. the nova is different in that it’s not so open but I’m listening to more music so it seems to engage me better

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by SamC

I can’t hear a difference between my Zen (with linear psu) and CD5XS into NDAC/XPS.

Posted on: 18 September 2018 by Timo

Timo posted:
When I checked it, Innuos did meet Roon recommendations...

Ups -- meant to write "did not"...

But good to learn that Hifi-Dog has a good Roon experience. I did a Roon test run on my NAS, which is slightly better computer-spec'd than Innous Mk 2, and I felt that my NAS could have been a bit faster for a better user experience. Having said this, it worked reliably without any crash -- something I couldn't say about the Naim app.