FOLLOW-UP
INNUOS STATEMENT & ROON NUCLEUS + SERVERS
When Jason Victor Serinus reviewed the expensive Statement server from Portuguese company Innuos1 in the April 2020 issue of Stereophile, he concluded that “Innuos has created a transparent instrument that scores big in soundstage size and depth, dynamics, and bass reach.” Comparing the Statement and a sample of the more affordable Roon Nucleus +2 (fed by a linear power supply)—both servers feeding his dCS Rossini and EMM DV2 D/A processors via USB—he found that via the Statement “the treble seemed slightly rounded, the presentation a touch warmer than through the Nucleus +.… The Statement warmed the piano and smoothed out the top in a manner that some would call analoglike or tubelike.”
These descriptions of sound quality suggested that I should be able to find measurable differences between the Statement and other sources of USB data. In addition, the review of the Statement in our sister magazine indicated substantially reduced jitter in some of the DACs that were connected to it. When the Statement arrived in my test lab, I didn’t have Jason’s dCS and EMM processors to hand, but I did have a Mytek Brooklyn and two AudioQuest DragonFlies, a Red and a Cobalt, that I I compared the spectra of each DAC’s analog output signal receiving 16- and 24-bit J-Test data sampled at 44.1kHz via USB, either from my MacBook Pro laptop or from the Statement. To sum up my findings: While there were no measurable differences in the Mytek’s output when fed data from the laptop or the Innuos server, I did find, with the AudioQuest DACs, that sourcing data from the Statement gave slightly cleaner spectra. The differences were at a very low level, however.
