Innuos began on a dining table in London in 2009, when Nuno Vitorino and Amélia Santos — both computer science engineers — built a music server because the ones available were not good enough, and sold around two hundred of them in six months. The company moved to Portugal in 2013 and now employs close to fifty people in Faro, where the products are designed and handcrafted.
Their central argument is that a music server is a power supply problem wearing a computer's clothes. Working with Dr. Sean Jacobs, Innuos has built its range around progressively more serious supplies: active rectification with Mundorf capacitor banks in the STREAM series, gallium-nitride regulation in the ZEN Next-Gen models, and in the NAZARÉ flagship, gallium-nitride modules carrying 376,000µF of capacitance apiece alongside custom Lundahl inductors.
The same thinking runs into the software, where most of the industry stops caring. Innuos writes its own operating system, Sense, on a real-time kernel, and reserves dedicated physical processor cores exclusively for audio. Storage is pooled directly to the processor rather than through RAID, on the grounds that RAID exacts a price worth avoiding. The output stage is modular on every current server, so a USB, I²S, or S/PDIF board can be swapped in — and the FLOW reclockers add direct connections to proprietary DAC interfaces from MSB, CH Precision, and EMM Labs.
The range runs from the half-width STREAM1, through the STREAM3, the ZEN and ZENith Next-Gen models, to NAZARÉ, with matching network switches and linear supplies at each level.
A server is heard through the DAC it feeds — an Innuos front end into dCS Audio or a Luxman DAC is the fair test. Hear what a server can do.
