Ooh. I’d be interested to read what you think of the Phoenix reclocker when you get a minute @Ryder35. Interestingly, they’ve built a ‘Phoenix Lite’ in to their new Pulse renderers.
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Only in the pulsar as I understand. I am really sensitive to digital harshness and, demoing the chord qutest it was very evident on the usb. With the optical input it went away but so did the detail. The Phoenix took a couple of days to warm up but now it is stable the sound is amazing. Smooth, warm and detailed. Bear in mind though that i am using it with a dac I am not familiar with so harder to tell what is doing what. I will remove it at some point to see what is doing what!
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I’ve just realised the Phoenix USB clocker lends itself to USB DAC’s, such as Chord, et al.
With an nDAC (as we have at home) it leads to maybe not the most eloquent solution with USB connectors, as it doesn’t accommodate a USB input directly.
Hmmm
Ah. Yes. I see that now 
. Just looked at the rear of the phoenix photo. I could have sworn it was coax out…
Zen Mini mk 3 : S specification upgrade
We’ve had our Zen Mini for about 12 months now…
We love what it does and is currently doing the musical “heavy lifting” in our house.
It is nearly always on and used to stream from our CD collection, archived onto the HDD.
Having noticed a few weeks back that Innous have upgraded their Zen Mini offer, with a new S specification, also read Innous are offering this as an upgrade option to existing Zen Mini owners.
I assume this to be something along the lines of this…
- Removing HDD and replacing with equivalent SSD instead (e.g. 1TB HDD out = 1TB SSD in, etc)
- Also, replacing 4GB of RAM for new 8GB RAM
- Wondering if they probably transfer data across (for customer) to new SSD?
- Maybe time to do this and soak test. Controlled environment, etc.
Personally, I think this is a “no brainer”.
Love my Zen Mini and defiantly will be doing S upgrade.
(Only wish they had this SSD option in the first place, when I bought mine January 2022).
For now, it looks like Innous will offer both HDD and new SSD options in parallel for a while.
The SSD option is a slightly higher price point.
My hope was that Innous provide upgrade kits - for Dealers - and let them get on with such things. However, our lovely dealer has since explained it needs to be returned to Innous UK, for their personal attention.
So, we are going to do this…
KR
R
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so is it available now? a bit of a grumble if it is as they had mine in for a new motherboard two weeks before xmas and i asked if they could do the upgrade and got no response… might have to take it back to Tony again later this yr then… depending on cost.
You may be thinking of the Pulse or Zen mini which have coaxial digital outputs ?
Hi @ratrat ,
i upgraded my ZEN to ZENith a couple of years ago which involved changing internal PSU’s, changing over from HDD → SSD, and the guys at Innuos transferred over all the data also (maybe just stipulate that when you drop it off at your dealer).
Back then it took probably 3 weeks from me dropping it off at my dealer to me getting it back again.
(it did go back to Innuos HQ in Portugal).
All in all it was excellent service and they did a great job.
Oh and by the way, the upgrade was well worth it also!
You wont be disappointed.
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Thanks for that…
Gives confidence 
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Moving towards sending our lovely Zen Mini back to Innous… (For the S upgrade).
Step one is securing a back up copy of our HDD archive. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. So being positive, moving towards this upgrade has prompted me to finally do it.
Set up was easy…
Plugged the back up drive into one of the rear panel USB sockets and selected a few “server setting” before performing the back up. Very straight forward, couldn’t really be any easier. (Didn’t even need to refer to a user manual for guidance).
The back up took about 90 minutes to do.
Yesterday’s (Saturday) task was purchasing an appropriate USB back up drive. With more time, might have ordered something online to be delivered direct to home. In the end, for ease, ended up in well known U.K. high street retailer (rhymes with ruby murray). I found myself looking at all the options and thinking about size - 1TB / 4TB / 8TB and also HDD vs SSD, as well as all the different brands, etc.
Then I reminded myself “it’s just a back up drive”. So as not to get carried away
Anyway, came away with the very capable WD Elements SE portable HDD. Just the 1TB version. Cost less than £50 quid. We’ve used these before around the house for other applications and they seem to work fine.
I actually quite like the diminutive size (and styling) of this Western Digital product.
My thoughts are to eventually leave this permanently installed. Maybe hidden around the back of the Zen Mini and out of sight. To make it easy to perform any future back ups, as and when.
Next step is to get the Zen Mini unit back into its box, for shipping…
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90 minutes? How much music is that? My 2,000 albums took an initial 10 minutes and rare it takes more than 5 now.
Hi Mike @mikehughescq
Thanks for the feedback. That’s interesting
We are at about 850 CD albums archived. It’s just under 300 GB
I have no idea why 90mins for first back up. Just sharing what happened…
We have different machines?
Is your machine already SSD?
FWIW. Prior to the back up, also did a software update, for latest version on the Zen Mini. Now at v 2.2.5. This update took maybe 20-30 mins.
Yes my Zenith SSD may be a factor. Certainly the 2.2.5 update took about 5 minutes at most and that was longer than usual.
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So, our Zen Mini mk3 was collected on Friday - collected by Innous - arranged via our dealer.
Looking at the paperwork, our unit is off to Portugal.
So, now understand that upgrade work will take place in Portugal, etc.
Looking forward to its return.
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how much may ask? i may ask tony to do mine too…
Sure
It varies according to your requirements
So best speak to Tony @BasicallySound
I suspect they have literally just starting taking orders for this upgrade, last few days.
Good luck.
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Thoughts about Roon?
Previously, I don’t think I would have considered using Roon with our Zen Mini mk3.
(Some how, I doubted it would have adequately dealt with this task)?
Now that we have committed to an upgrade to S specification, I am wondering if the better spec’ might change my opinion?
Any thoughts or feedback from other users - using a Zen Mini mk3 as Roon Core - would be most welcome ?
Anyone with newer S variant using Roon too ?
KR
R
I ran roon using my zen mini as a core with no issues, even when upsampling.
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