The British-Portuguese company Innuos has been delighting experts and hi-fi fans alike with its ZEN music servers for several years. The design and price are right, the hardware is of high quality and optimized for musical purposes, and a self-developed operating system ensures both the best possible sound and very stable operation.
When it comes to controlling the home streaming system, however, the developers - like many competitors - rely on mobile apps from other manufacturers. The development of apps for mobile devices is a very special thing and requires different know-how than the development of a music operating system. In addition, in the technologically extremely fast-moving mobile world, an app that has just been developed is actually already obsolete and needs constant further development. Specialists in this field are simply better at it.
In addition, Innuos supports the open UPnP standard, so that users can choose their own favorites from the multitude of available apps. Often you have j already had good experience with a certain app and are used to its handling. Then in most cases you can continue to control your system as usual even after switching to Innuos.
However, there is one system that has generated as much attention in music software as Innuos has in music hardware. We are of course talking about Roon, the all-round solution consisting of music management, information database, sound-optimized software player, highly specialized server and handy mobile app with a huge range of functions that is unparalleled worldwide - and has been for years. Roon is a great example of how intelligently designed software paired with ease of use can turn modern digital media into a sensual experience. In other words, Roon not only works great, it's also a lot of fun to work with.
Roon is anything but a simple toy. On the contrary: If you want, you can use the Roon setting options to delve into the depths of the operating system in a way that otherwise only trained IT specialists can do. But you don't have to worry about it if you don't want to.
(You can learn more about Roon in an earlier blog post here.)
But back to Innuos. Even if the developers are quite satisfied with their own solutions, you have the greatness to recognize that Roon simply goes a few decisive steps further and is simply unbeatable simply because of the huge and constantly updated database with additional musical information. But the world of digital high-end is small, so the decision-makers at Innuos and Roon have long since got to know and appreciate each other. And made a rather unusual decision in the traditional business world. Although Roon has also been offering its own servers for some time, so Innuos should be a competitor according to the traditional view, the Americans have allowed Innuos to offer its users a complete Roon Core integration as an option. Roon then takes over part of the functions of the Innuos operating system, the ZEN server becomes a full-fledged Roon server in the network. In order for this to work, of course, a paid Roon account is required. At just under 120 US dollars a year or a one-time fee of 500 US dollars, this may not necessarily be cheap, but the constant useful further developments, the excellent functionality and, above all, the carefully maintained database with extensive additional information is definitely worth such an investment.
The following tutorial video provides an overview of the commissioning of an Innuos server and the activation of Roon. Further information and prices on the various Innuos ZEN servers can be found at auditorium.de.
