Innuos Statement music server
We carry within us the wonders we seek outside us.—Rumi
There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them.—Ralph Marston, The Daily Motivator
Put these two quotes together, shake vigorously, and you’ve got the essence of a music server. Unless your container isn’t tightly sealed, in which case you’ve got a mess.
A dedicated streaming music server has but one overriding purpose: to enable the discovery and delivery of digitally encoded music—and then get out of the way. Ideally, it performs like the best of servants, keeping everything in order, noting items worthy of attention, doing exactly as its master wishes, and then bowing out without drawing attention to itself.
For probably the majority of music-lovers, an all-purpose computer, used for pretty much everything except washing dishes, serves as their music server. Some use a dedicated computer reserved solely for music playback.
Typical computers, though—dedicated or not—aren’t optimized for music playback; because they run all sorts of processes irrelevant to audio, and, because noise usually doesn’t affect nonmusical functions, they are saddled with noise—not the directly audible kind, but the kind that pollutes audio signals and makes them sound worse, in a variety of ways. The noise comes not just from apps working in the background—antivirus software, word processors, and a host of nondefeatable, automatically updating programs—but also from ports and pathways designed for multiple functions and not engineered to keep polluting EMI away from precious music signals.
Enter the dedicated high-end audio server, a class that includes the Innuos Statement music server/streamer/ripper ($13,750 and up), the flagship server from a Portuguese company that makes nothing but. Innuos was founded in 2013 by software engineers Nuno Vitorino and Amelia Santos, who met in 1994 as university students and, later, got married. Seeds for the company were planted in 2009, when Vitorino assembled a music server in his garage, offered it on eBay, and sold 200 units in six months.
“When I started Innuos, there was nothing available for people who were not technologically savvy,” Vitorino explained in an interview via Skype. Seven years later, thanks in no small part to Managing Director Santos’s INSEAD-honed business skills, the company employs teams of software and hardware developers and is expanding to new headquarters with a sound room exceeding 500 square feet. Building that room was essential for the couple, whose two children, ages 5 and 9, frequently commandeer the home system to watch Paw Patrol.
“We own the company 100%,” Vitorino said. “We wanted to do our own vision and remain independent of investors or private-equity companies who might alter our approach in order to get their investment back fast. The good thing is that we’ve always been profitable.”
Innuos unveiled a prototype of the Statement at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest and launched the product in early 2019. At the 2019 RMAF, they launched the PhoenixUSB reclocker. Expected next is PhoenixNET, an Ethernet reclocker, which Vitorino likens to an audiophile network switch. In 2020, Innuos intends to completely revamp its software while also expanding the company’s reach beyond Europe and North America, to Asia in particular.
Noise, begone!
I first met Vitorino at RMAF 2019, where I briefly auditioned several of the company’s servers. It quickly became clear that, as the most transparent of the lot, the Statement was the most appropriate Innuos product for use in my reference setup. I set up a review.
The two-box Statement’s “power unit” connects to its server via two short umbilical cords. The boxes are intended to be stacked, with the power unit on bottom, to keep the umbilical lengths short—shorter lengths presumed to be less susceptible to noise pollution than longer ones. Longer cords are available for users who must, or prefer, to put the two boxes side by side or on different shelves.
The power unit box is reserved for coarse AC/DC conversion. Eight cable pairs, each containing a power wire and its ground, carry otherwise untreated DC power to the top box via the two umbilical cords. Regulation occurs in the top box.
Once regulated to “nice, clean, steady power”—Vitorino’s words—this direct current travels over very short cable lengths, soldered point-to-point, to the server unit’s individual component blocks. “We don’t give the power a chance to get polluted again,” Vitorino said. “If we located the entire PS in the bottom box and did the regulation there as well, the clean power would have to go through cable connectors, external cables, more connectors, and then internal cable. Along the way, it would pick up all sorts of . . . interference. You can shield it, you can protect, but it’s never 100% perfect. Our arrangement allows us to send cleaner power to the server’s different components.”
The DC emerging from the bottom box comprises eight separate supplies: three for each voltage of the motherboard, one for the CPU, one for the SSD storage device, one for the Ethernet Reclocker board, one for the USB Reclocker Board, and one that feeds only the USB clock. (The Statement uses OCXO clocks—oven-controlled crystal oscillators, which are large because their mass allows more carefully controlled internal temperature, hence superior stability, to the oscillator. There are separate clocks for the USB and Ethernet boards.)
Regulators, which are intended to ensure stable power, can themselves be a source of noise. Which is why “there are no switching regulators on our USB board,” Vitorino told me. “Switching regulators are quite efficient, but they create a lot of noise because they oscillate a lot.” Instead, the external supplies provide the board with the three voltage levels it needs, each voltage level stabilized by discrete, low-noise LT3045 regulators. “The objective is low noise and a better-timed signal,” Vitorino told me. Vitorino also told me that the normal precision of an oscillator on a computer motherboard or USB board is about 30 parts per million. “Ours is 3 parts per billion,” he said. “Our clocks, handmade in the US, are the kind used in missiles and aviation because they offer less noise and greater precision. To get as much precision out of our clocks as we can, we use two independent clocks at the right frequencies, 24MHz for USB and 25MHz for Ethernet. The clock signal travels directly through the board without using cables. The better timed the signal is that you send your DAC, the less work the DAC has to do to interpret the results.”
Inside the Statement, Vitorino and his crew have attempted to identify, isolate, and eliminate all contributors to noise: “We went through the motherboard and all the components with an oscilloscope and a proper probe, identified which components made the most noise, and worked with our custom motherboard supplier to remove non-essential noise-creating components that might be useful for a PC but have no place in an audio server.”
Given Vitorino’s attention to noise and power delivery, it came as no surprise to hear him say, “The Statement certainly benefits from a really good power cable. In addition, a lot of our users have had very good experiences with changing the fuse to another slow-blow fuse. We tested quite a number of fuses, some of them very high end, before deciding on any. They do make a difference in terms of sound quality—they convey more air around instruments—but some aftermarket fuses negatively affect dynamics. We like our systems to have quite a lot of dynamics and rhythm—a lot of PRAT—and with some fuses, my feet weren’t tapping anymore.”
I needed no convincing about the impact of power quality on a fine audio system. More than a year ago, when I was working with Roon’s Rob Darling to improve playback from a Roon-equipped Intel NUC (since replaced by Roon’s Nucleus +), we moved my router to the hallway, far from the system, and created an Ethernet > optical > Ethernet pathway to isolate router-related noise. Then we replaced the switch-mode power supply on one of my Ethernet/optical converters with a Small Green Computer 15W linear power supply ($160) fed by a Nordost Odin 2 power cable. The increase in transparency and detail was so dramatic that I tried an LPS on the router, and then the NUC. The additional increase in bass, color saturation, and detail was so marked that every wall wart in my system was banished and replaced by two Small Green Computer/HDPLEX 200W power supplies, each of which can power up to four devices of different voltages.
Moving up
The Statement’s server box, which includes a CD ripper, is fitted with special support feet, asymmetrically positioned to minimize vibration. “The bottom power box is not very sensitive to vibration and not in need of special feet with special placement, but the top box is very sensitive.” Vitorino said. “One foot is below the SSD, and another below the regulators for the USB port. We wanted to put the third under the boards on the other side, but because the box needs to be balanced, we put it a little further back under the motherboard, which is also a sensitive component. The feet are tuned to the weight and resonant frequency of the chassis and designed to remove low-frequency vibration that comes from air moved by speaker drivers. They’re fairly high end and would cost about $500/set of three at retail.”
Goals and preferences
I have yet to encounter a manufacturer whose ultimate goal is the sonic equivalent of a huge Saint Bernard slobbering all over the floor. Some, however, do prefer a bit of warmth to what they call sterility. Not Vitorino, who declared, “We don’t pursue a ‘sound’ per se. It would be very attractive to make it very warm sounding, particularly for those who like valve amplifiers. If you go to shows and make it nice and warm and smooth, everyone will like it. That’s not what we want to do. We want to keep it as neutral as possible, reduce as much as we can the amount of power noise interference that might affect the signal, and provide the best timing possible for that signal. This enables the rest of the hi-fi chain to perform at its best. We don’t tweak the tonal balance or the amount of treble or bass.”
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COMPANY INFO
Innuos
Portugal
(202)221-2377
innuos.com
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Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
John Atkinson May 2020
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