Getting specific, there are three power supply paths with their own rectifier, filter capacitance (each >20'000µF) and voltage regulators. These feed the CPU; the remaining motherboard with optical drive; and the hard drive (1TB SSD option, 2TB/4TN upgrades for a surcharge). This triple separation safeguards particularly the USB and Ethernet outputs from distortion. Furthermore, there's galvanic isolation and preceding the power transformer, a shielded AC line filter. All of it recalls classic hifi constructions, not computer tech.

Typically positioned in proximity to loudspeakers, a music server takes daily baths in strong vibrations. That equals microphony effects which our Portuguese battle with a maximally rigid enclosure and additional damping material in strategic areas. Here Emanuel Ey pointed out more advantages for SSD drives. They not only offer faster access times—tap on a song in the app and bingo—they don't suffer moving parts which produce mechanical resonances. The less things vibrate, the better they sound. Then SSD work off lower voltages than classic HDD to allow smaller voltage regulators. Those turned out to be sonically superior. Listening to Ey for a bit and forgetting how we started, I soon suspected that he was on about point-to-point wired tube exotica. Alas, this is a computer with two 4GB RAM buffers, one of them as cache for SSD music data.

Software. Hardware pays only half the rent. To set up shop and do the business, the right software infrastructure is just as important. Ey talked about perfect integration with their hardware. Whilst platform-invariant software across endless computer models might offer similar functionality, code that's been purpose-written for specific hardware and ultimate sonics pays back in kind. I was familiar with similar arguments from Carlos Candeias, engineer/owner of B.M.C. For their dance, the Innuos experts began coding their own BIOS firmware for the motherboard, continued with a proprietary Linux-based operating system and finally modified the Logitech Media server interface. In use meanwhile, the Innuos Zenith MkII didn't shout 'computer' at all. That was down to its terrific GUI. I've never yet hooked up a music server faster. Plug in the LAN cable, power up, type 'my.innuous.com' into the browser – and vroom.

Precisely because the interface was browser-based, I didn't have to fire up a PC/Mac or install an app. Any smartphone or tablet can tag/import files, rip CDs and set up backups. So intuitive was this interface that any additional words on my part would only make it more complicated. Still, I want to highlight a few special features.

Power supply.

1/ Backup can be scheduled after, say 10 newly imported albums, rather more useful than timing it by date or days elapsed.
2/ Buying a 24/96 album from highresaudio.com for example, the usual MO is to unzip the download, copy it over to the server via the home network, then refresh the latter's index manually. With Innuos the zip file gets copied to a special folder. Click on 'auto import' and presto: unzipping, importing and tagging all unspool in one easy step.
3/ Should a CD rip suffer metadata issues or turn out to be a duplicate (something more common with me than you'd think), it gets quarantined automatically. This keeps the actual library clean and allows one to baby sit problematic imports separately. Regular imports are automatically sorted by quality (compressed, Redbook, high resolution) and issues with over-long names, special characters and such sorted.