@NO-QUARTER, your DAC is the Musical Fidelity MX?
I think it all depends on the DAC, if your DAC doesn’t have a good isolation for the USB interface, then it makes more difference than for a DAC that has an isolated USB interface.
Yes the MX is my current Dac.
This is normal out of the box behavior, at least in my Region. I thought mine was defective to, as like yours, it was doing nothing, and I was waiting for the lights and getting very annoyed lol. So, I contacted iFi support, who by the way is super fast and responsive. They simply told me to push the right side button, and presto! On came my lights and all is well.
I bought this unit to use an a Roon endpoint into my 272, and its been absolutely flawless. I am running it in Roon only mode (2). I have seen comments on fb of ppl laughing at those pairing a $600 streaming transport with a high end system, or a $3K DAC, but I see it as an excellent way to “upgrade” old technology. Things have changed, and these “low end” streaming transports (sans DAC) perform extremely well in a high end system. So did the NODE for that matter, however, I find the ZS has more detail and noticeable high end than the NODE.
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I had pressed the right button but the unit was not responding at all
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Indeed. I never had to press any button other than power either. If it works out of the box, it should just have fired right up without needing anything.
Zen Stream and I had an enjoyable evening. I switched from USB to coax and, in the context of my DAC, the improvement was substantial. A layer of HF grit removed.
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What Dac are you using FZ? I have only used USB with my Zen,mainly because that is the best cable i have. Not sure i can even log into that ifi home screen to change the outputs anyway…always a head scratcher for a non computer geek like me.
Oh in the settings menu under “Playback Options”. You just select USB or SPDIF.
I’m using a Luxman D-N150 DAC. Which Luxman recommend using the USB interface on but only if you have a device that supports Bulk Pet (almost no hardware does - though there are Mac and Windows drivers for it).
Bulk Pet is a USB equivalent to network jumbo frames. Very large data packets means fewer total data packets and less processing noise in the USB controller compared to ASIO USB used by every other audio device. I was using that Bulk Pet driver before with Audirvana and the Luxman USB cable. The noise floor was amazingly low. I mentioned the following in my initial comparison between Audirvana and the Zen Stream…
It seems that, unless the Lenovo micro PC had a less noisy USB interface than the Zen (possible I suppose), that the increased processing noise in the USB controller due to the move from Bulk Pet USB to ASIO USB was the cause for the “less pristine” aspect of my initial impression. Moving to SPDIF over coax definitely removed some grit in my setup.
Of course the caveat is that if I ever acquire any 32bit audio tracks, I’ll have to move back to USB. Once you go to those data rates with SPDIF, you need dual mono digital coax or AES, neither of which are supported by the Zen or the Luxman.
Anyway, with the Furutech Evolution Digi-II coax cable in place (a very nice cable with Furutech’s own version of a decoupled air plug), I had a very enjoyable midnight listening session. The cable is a bit overkill for the cost of the Zen and the DAC, but I got it for comparative peanuts.
All things being equal on lower end gear such as this, USB should outperform Toslink or coax in terms of eliminating problems like jitter. The issues that arise are more likely to be the processing noise of the receiving USB controller itself and what sort of EM/RF noise is transmitted from the transport to the DAC over the USB cable. But nothing is absolute as I discovered.
My problem is just getting to the settings menu.Push the right button to activate a hotspot,type in Ifi local,then it wants a password,to what?,my router? This is what confuses me,then it asks me if i want to reset the password or something. At this point i usually give up an go back to Tidal connect,which works. Then if i type in what i think is the password it jumps back to the beginning.I miss Naim streamers for their simplicity,plug them in and they just work.
Ohhh stop!
Don’t press any buttons on the Zen itself. Just go to the web UI and click the settings icon (the little cog). Lemme show you…
Then
And finally
Ha Ha, when you say the web UI,are you on an IPad?,or a PC?
When i first got this thing i somehow had all those screens showing on my IPad,but can not get back there.I do not know how to get to that screen without it asking me for the password,in order to hit"next".
What drives me nuts is i know i am on the network,because it is playing Tidal through Lan.I took the Wifi antenna off,do i need to reattach it?
It shouldn’t matter. I was using my Android phone, but not via the ifi app. Just the ifi web page via Firefox. The layout is a little wider on a browser on my PC but it is essentially the same interface.
If you are playing music through it, then it has a network connection to something and you shouldn’t need to make any changes like connecting any antenna. Mine is just using wired LAN with no antenna.
I suppose it is possible you’ve fiddled with it in some way I can’t imagine. But you should normally just be able to go direct to the http://ifi.local address (unless you changed that during initial setup).
I am not at home right now,but when i type that into my IPad or Laptop,it just sends me to the brochure page they send you with the Zen. Type that into google search you mean right?
I realize this is simple for people that use computers all day,but i am a machinist,and these things send my brain into a downward spiralling vortex of confusion.
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No that is a local broadcast address. You have to be at home on the same network as the Zen.
I’ve worked in IT all my adult life nearly (except for a brief period as a happy but poor graphic artist). There is nothing simple about any of it. People that work in IT that claim this stuff is simple, either don’t know how much they don’t know, or have been very lucky.
Not sure what you mean by this, thanks for attempting to help me FZ, i am visiting my dealer that i bought the Zen from tomorrow,so maybe he can help me.
It means that addresses that end in .local are only available when you are on the same network. In other words, at home with with Zen. If you try and access something like that away from home, you will either get no response at all, or a login prompt from your router.
Your dealer should indeed be able to talk you through this.
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I sure hope so,he uses a Zen too,but with Roon.I initially tried using it without Roon,got frustrated and signed up for 3 months for $2 trial of Roon.That expired last week,so i am back to pulling my hair out.Everything was easy using Roon,Tidal,Internet radio,my own local music all accessed through their App.
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