While this review is about the Innuos Statement, the background starts a year earlier when I sold my Sonus Faber + vacuum tube based system (it sounded great but generated too much heat in my small room) and replaced it with a Magico, Devialet combination linked with Synergistic Research cabling. Due to the fact that Devialet was making a major revision to its entire line-up I had to wait 3 months for delivery. Idle hands as they say. I had an extra shelf on my rack so before I knew it I had a Michell Orbe/SME Type IV/Ortofon Candenza Black on the way!
With the system installed, the TT carefully set-up and calibrated and a small collection on mint EMI and Decca vinyl purchased from a UK dealer I was obtaining exceptional results, however my original goal had been an all-digital system for local and remote streaming. After doing some considerable research and auditioning I purchased an Innuos Zenith SE server. Roughly 48 hours after its installation the Zenith was producing utter magic….which literally redefined what I thought possible from digital. The sound was rich, immersive, highly focussed and multi-layered with incredible drive and impetus and an amazing ability to engage the listener. Music I knew well revealed new depths of spaciousness and detail, while instrumental timbre was so rich and pure it sent shivers down my spine.
I set about ripping my entire CD collection. Prior to the Zenith I’d been a track picker, like a chocolate box picker only with CD tracks. I had my favorites and that’s what I played. With the Zenith there was an alternative way to play music…..random. I could pick pretty much any attribute… album, artist, genre you name it; so I kept it simple. Random tracks. That first listening session was amazing….incredible, compelling music that I’d literally never heard before. 18 out of 20 tracks new and including some of the best music I’d ever heard. How could I have owned this music for 20 years or more and never heard it? The second night was the same, and the third and so on. Each evening at the end of listening I clicked the save button and captured the entire random selection as a play list. I was amazed. I had music that sounded better than I’d ever heard and essentially I had a huge, brand new collection of it. Literally enough for years to come. To say the Zenith SE was delivering value would be a major understatement given that it had just brought my entire CD collection to life.
I carried on like this for several weeks, considering myself a very lucky guy. With everything run in I now had a situation where the Zenith SE was consistently producing magical music that significantly outperformed my turntable, even when said music was streamed from Qobuz, making the turntable rather pointless. So when Innuos announced the Statement a quick call to my dealer was all it needed and the TT was gone. Vinyl collection anyone?
I spent the 8 months between ordering the Statement and taking delivery in tuning my network, essentially obtaining a super clean, dedicated 200-250 Mbps bit stream based entirely on Sean Jacob’s designed MC3 power supplies. Sean designs the power supplies for Innuos so essentially my system including network is now based on the same power supply design throughout.
Ripping CDs on the Zenith SE or Statement is an absolute breeze. Decide if you want Wav or Flac format (I chose Wav), plug in a USB disc drive of sufficient capacity for back-up purposes and proceed to feed it CDs. It will rip the CD to the built-in SSD in under 5 minutes (a little longer if you want silent ripping), quarantine any duplicates or bad copies, obtain and store all the meta data from the internet and produce a back-up to the USB drive at regular intervals. In ripping over 2,500 CDs it detected only a handful of bad tracks, which were indeed faulty…otherwise ripping was completely stress and error free.
Before the Statement arrived I made a final back-up of my library through the my-Innuos dashboard, so restoring my library was simply a matter of connecting the back-up disc, clicking the appropriate ‘restore’ wizard and the unit rebuilt my entire library on the Statement’s SSD. Totally straightforward. Connecting to Qobuz involved inputting my account password and I was immediately streaming my favorites.
So let’s now move on to the Statement’s performance. Essentially what you have is a turnkey, easy to operate server with by far the best sound I personally have ever heard, analog or digital. Now I have no doubt whatsoever that the sound I have could be improved….better speakers in a better room, superior cables, cleaner power maybe, earthing perhaps but I do not believe you’ll find a better source; certainly not a better digital source and you’d need to spend one heck of a lot if you wanted to even approach the sound quality via a turntable and records. My own fairly reasonable turntable, arm and cartridge got nowhere near close to the Statement’s sound quality.
Poorly engineered and mastered recordings will of course still reveal their shortcoming, but in an average collection like mine, these distasterpieces are extremely few and far between. The vast majority of recordings range from perfectly acceptable and a joy to listen to utterly mesmerizing and stunningly beautiful. With a good recording, the sound is fully enveloping, filling the entire room and beyond. The air between performers has an acoustic texture that changes from track to track, giving each piece its own unique character and identity. Music has a vibrancy, energy and immediacy that will instantly remind you of why we all love live performances. Brass has a brightness, intensity and vibrancy, words that may often suggest pain and listener fatigue that in the case of the Statement are meant to convey a sense of liveness, realness and excitement. Violins resonate with energy and complexity, clearly communicating the virtuosity of notes shaped by masters of the craft. With flute you have a sense of air moving through the instrument, of the instrument adding its unique timbre and character and of the musician… breathing, blowing air over the mouthpiece, the keys opening and closing. With every instrument you hear its unique colour, its timbre, its mechanical operation and sounds made by each musician, just like you would in a live recital. This may all sound like characteristics of the Statement, but they’re not. The sounds I describe are characteristics of the recording that the Statement extracts perfectly, preserving the musical signal in its entirety for your enjoyment. Vivid, vibrant, music that’s full of natural energy and tonal authenticity, that instantly attracts and engages the listener; communicating all the skills and prowess of the musicians. Music that makes you excited, sad, tense with anticipation or joyful at its sheer beauty. The Statement lets you enjoy more of the intrinsic qualities and nature of the music. What you’ll come to appreciate with the Statement is that for certain genre of music, presentation is just as important as the musical content and interpretation and you’ll appreciate how the skill and artistry of the recording engineer is an intrinsic part of the whole performance. Certain recordings seem to actually modify the air in your listening room
Recently I’ve been thoroughly enjoying classical music streamed through the Statement. Piano that energizes the room with its intensity, acoustic complexity, resonance and haunting decay; solo instruments like bassoon, oboe, or french horn rich with their timbral complexity and the acoustics of their recording venue. Orchestras where you have the best seat in the house, every instrument making its own distinct contribution with a presence and clarity that’ll remind you of the live event. And what makes the profound enjoyment of this music all the more remarkable is when you consider its source. Internet radio at 128kbps for heavens sake. There are of course some deficiencies but only in comparison to streaming red book 44.1 kHz 16 bit, which offers greater soundstage size, improved layering and height information and a certain weight and heft that leaves the 128kbps sounding a little light weight and less spectacular by comparison. So why even listen to Internet Radio? The programming material of Radio Swiss Classic is an absolute joy. I can listen for hours, marvelling at the sound quality and discovering tons of new music, all of which is to my taste. The sound quality of the Statement is so good that sacrificing a little to obtain such beautiful music is definitely a price worth paying and hardly a downside.
Of course, this level of performance does require that your network be in the same ballpark, quality-wise as the Statement. If your network relies on cheap SMPSs and consumer-grade cabling there will be a marked difference between local and remote streaming; but if your network is based on high quality LPSs and carefully selected cabling, the differences are vanishingly small. For the average Statement user, spending a couple of thousand dollars getting the network absolutely right will pay back in spades, providing access to huge quantities of music with genuinely SOTA sound quality. For me, that’s what the Statement is all about.
