Nuno Vitorino of INNUOS

Innuos is relatively young brand, as it was established in 2014 basing on the initiative of Mr. Nuno Vitorino, who, in 2009, started the LIV Connected Technology company.

 

Three years later, he changed its name to Simply Connected, and in 2015 to Innuos.

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VIEWS BY NUNO ON HIS PRODUCTS AND THEIR DESIGN :

 

“The SSD and CPU are the noisiest components so the system benefits a lot with them being separately powered as it helps them not to contaminate other components.”

 

“The larger transformer isn’t about reducing noise but essentially to reduce impedance on the PSU as it can fill up the capacitors quicker. This allows the PSU to provide faster transients to respond to power requirements from the different components. It’s also a much better shielded transformer and reduces high-frequency vibration.”

“The funny thing is that these kind of factors look like they’d make a lot more sense in an amplifier but we have no doubt in my mind that they’re a factor in a digital source too – just compare a Zenith to an SE and you’ll hear it right away.”

 

“Dr. Sean Jacobs is the genius here. He designed the PSU circuit exclusively for us and it is where math comes in. Too much [transformer] will not make much of an effect and you’ll be adding up just dead weight and adding cost. You need to evaluate the PSU circuit, measure the capacitance and then calculate how many VAs you need for the toroidal.”

 

"Piling on more pounds are the power supplies’ heatsink and anti-vibration treatment, the latter applied to the underside of the unit’s top panel, about which Vitorino says, It doesn’t only convert vibration into small amounts of heat but adds mass to the chassis to dissipate vibration caused by the sound waves coming from the speakers.”

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More from Vitorino : “Our goal is also to ensure users can fully manage and play music without the need of a PC/Mac as we see a trend where users are replacing their aging laptops for tablets. By using a web-based responsive interface that adapts to the kind of screen you are looking (be it a smartphone, tablet or computer) we can also maintain full UI consistency between platforms. If you open the innuOS Dashboard on a smartphone, you’ll see the UI layout adapts automatically to the screen – an example is the album editing screen where the layout is more linear than on a tablet. This allows you to even use a smartphone to edit your music library easily – which is great if you just remembered to make a quick change or check the status of a CD ripping, etc.”

 

“Case-in-point: Standard vs Low-Latency mode for the Music Player. We could build a full UI so you could tweak period, buffer sizes, you name it. And yet, how many users actually know enough to use it properly, particularly as you’ll get some very nasty noises if you do it wrong? So instead, we defined a standard mode that works well with all DACs and a Low-Latency mode, which we tried ourselves on a number of DACS and did improve sound on most (though not all – hence the option). This way you just flip a switch and give it a go.”

 

“Some people ask us why not rip in AIFF or other additional formats? Because there should be a clear case for it. Currently you can rip in WAV if you want to make sure you get the full uncompressed stream for peace of mind, or FLAC (with zero compression) if you want a more universal format to use with a number of systems. If we get a clear case for including AIFF, then we will. But just adding an option for the sake of it just adds to the whole complexity associated with digital audio.”

 

“The software is the same as the other Zeniths and in fact the same across the whole Zen line (with some tweaks specifically for each system). We focus on system synergy between the hardware, firmware and software. From the system BIOS and device firmware to Linux Kernel and the sound subsystem, we try to minimise the signal paths and lower power noise produced by the system. An example is memory-playback: when playing through the integrated music player, all music is loaded into 4Gb of dedicated RAM and played directly from there. This keeps SSD access quiet during playback. We configure the SSD controller extensively to limit the amount of noise the SSD can do on the system, helped by the fact the SSD uses its own linear power supply as well as vibration treatment.”

 

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