[SiF123]

If you are willing to I have on occasion offered my assistance thru PM if you would like to share with me how you have diagnosed the issue to be the ZS software, I would gladly pass that on to R&D.

I will also challenge you to use any of the "other" streaming services that the ZS works with, by using their free trial procedures to see if the ZS exhibits the same behavior with them as it does with Tidal.

Again, not looking to be argumentative just trying to help

Cheers!!

Thanks, yes I appreciate that. But given that iFi are an innovative company and I have/would like to buy further products in the future to continue supporting them, it is frustrating that they are let down by something so simple. And it isn't that some experience bugs and others don't - the bugs exist for everyone, it is just that they manifest themselves under certain conditions for some people. This is down to the design not accommodating these conditions, or the testing has not been exhaustive to identify issues under different environments.

Certainly given the level of consistent faults since the product release it is a disappointment that they have gone unresolved. Many new products quickly require a few releases to resolve real world issues!

 

[billh556]

Whoa, I sure hope my newbie posts from about a month ago didn't take this thread in the wrong direction. I greatly appreciate the suggestions and help I received from Mr BubbaHyde and others, so much so that I found myself thinking, "oh man, I've found a great community of folks in the headphone space... now I'll need to read all the introductory stuff there and dip my toes in *that* part of the audiophile realm!"

What happened to me with 2 ZS units (shutdown after 30-45 minutes of playing) doesn't seem like it is a common problem. I envy those of you who have units that run trouble free for months on end. As a software developer by trade, I suspect there's a hard-to-repro problem in some component of more recently built units. After my experience with two new ones, I'm thinking about trying to find a used one that would presumably be from an earlier batch of builds. If I find one, I'm pretty confident I'll have the same experience that others here have described.

I just want to say that I'm not tweaking them. They are passive parts of my audio chain, and all the cataloging and organization of my music collection is done in Roon. The ZS is a Roon-recognized device for my purposes.

I also want to say that I'm in no way disparaging iFi audio. I have multiple copies of the iPurifier 3 USB signal cleaning device, and they all work flawlessly, run 24/7, and with certain DACs make a *huge* improvement in the sound. My only issue with the company was a kind of iffy handling of a support ticket where I described my problem with the ZS, and the response was (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "Great idea to have them stay on all the time. I'll pass the suggestion to the development team." I could have pursued and clarified my expectations with them a bit more, but I was on the 2nd unit then and decided to take a chance on finding an older one for sale. But I still have good things to say about the company, the dedication it shows to interacting with their customers, and the quality of their products. I believe my experience was a bit of a one-off, based on others' descriptions of their experiences with ZS, and my own with other iFi products.

So, that's a long-winded way of saying thank you for the help I found here. This thread seems to me like a great sample of the head-fi community, one I hope to learn a lot about quality headphones in the coming weeks.

Peace out!
Bill H

 

[Mr BubbaHyde]

Whoa, I sure hope my newbie posts from about a month ago didn't take this thread in the wrong direction. I greatly appreciate the suggestions and help I received from Mr BubbaHyde and others, so much so that I found myself thinking, "oh man, I've found a great community of folks in the headphone space... now I'll need to read all the introductory stuff there and dip my toes in *that* part of the audiophile realm!"

What happened to me with 2 ZS units (shutdown after 30-45 minutes of playing) doesn't seem like it is a common problem. I envy those of you who have units that run trouble free for months on end. As a software developer by trade, I suspect there's a hard-to-repro problem in some component of more recently built units. After my experience with two new ones, I'm thinking about trying to find a used one that would presumably be from an earlier batch of builds. If I find one, I'm pretty confident I'll have the same experience that others here have described.

I just want to say that I'm not tweaking them. They are passive parts of my audio chain, and all the cataloging and organization of my music collection is done in Roon. The ZS is a Roon-recognized device for my purposes.

I also want to say that I'm in no way disparaging iFi audio. I have multiple copies of the iPurifier 3 USB signal cleaning device, and they all work flawlessly, run 24/7, and with certain DACs make a *huge* improvement in the sound. My only issue with the company was a kind of iffy handling of a support ticket where I described my problem with the ZS, and the response was (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "Great idea to have them stay on all the time. I'll pass the suggestion to the development team." I could have pursued and clarified my expectations with them a bit more, but I was on the 2nd unit then and decided to take a chance on finding an older one for sale. But I still have good things to say about the company, the dedication it shows to interacting with their customers, and the quality of their products. I believe my experience was a bit of a one-off, based on others' descriptions of their experiences with ZS, and my own with other iFi products.

So, that's a long-winded way of saying thank you for the help I found here. This thread seems to me like a great sample of the head-fi community, one I hope to learn a lot about quality headphones in the coming weeks.

Peace out!
Bill H

On the contrary, all posts are welcome, it's my opinion and my focus of this thread was just to try not generally disparage iFi audio for silly reasons. You see what had begun to happen in the main thread was just a general ongoing beat-up over "software versions" or the fact that the possibility of "upgrading" the ZS to do things it was never intended to do. The other thing that started happening was the thread was invaded by a few folks whose intention was specifically to downgrade the product because of their support for another product, to me this wasn't healthy.

So this thread came about because basically at the time I started it, I felt the setup for the ZS was not clear in the pamphlets provided by iFi and I felt I had a better way, and also I felt my setup/reset procedure was simpler and more effective.

I mean to personally degrade no one, nor their opinion, but if I read something that I don't feel is quite right I speak out. Just as an example (not poking anyone) I have read over and over again about issues with Tidal, yet I ever rarely read about Qobuz or Spotify having the same behavior, now mind you I have never personally had these issues, but admittedly I am a Roon user, so My experience with Tidal "Connect" is way less than users who only use that, and not Roon, but whenever there was an issue I tried to use whatever that person was using to see if I could help or duplicate the issue.

Too many times on these forums we leave out key details for the sake of quickly posting an issue, as an example I remember trying to help someone off this forum who was having issues with streaming, only to find out they were using a VPN and another person's login, and sometimes the service would just disconnect! Now this story is only an example but it's meant to show that often times we don't get all the facts of a scenario until we dig further.

My only purpose for being here was to learn about the equipment and read about others experiences, in that process this has lead to me now working for Ifi, which was announced, will that change the way I respond sometimes? I'm sure it will, but I will always be as honest as I can be, and anytime I have ever encountered an issue or someone else's issue that I felt Ifi should know about I made sure to tag them so they would see it.

Are they perfect...no
Do they try... yes

As I will continue to...

Cheers!!

 

[nerdorama]

Not related to the recent discussion but thought I would share this experience. I've been using a USB hard drive connected to the Zen and it has worked fine for me, but recently my son suggested moving my music library onto a thumb drive. I bought a 512Gb SanDisc, copied my library onto it, and it is a lot faster responding to the iFi app. Probably not news to most but I'm really happy with how it is working.
All the best.

 

[twrr]

How many folders do you have on hdd? Type of formatting? Are you using updated version of volumio?

 

[DancingSea]

Aloha - perhaps I've been lucky, but my ZenStream has been nearly trouble free for over a year. The only hiccup is when I have the ZS connected to my DAC via both USB (Curious Evolved) and Coax (Audio Art). The hope was to be able to easily switch back and forth, but this seems to confuse the ZS. Any ideas on how to make simultaneous USB and Coax connections stable?

The little ZS has a ton of unlocked potential. I started off with the included iPower wall wart. Then moved to the iFi Elite (12V). And now am using the Farad Super3 (12V) LPS. Wow, the Farad takes the ZS very high up the ladder. Recently had an Aurender N100H here for audition. With Tidal Connect, the ZS/Farad combo is very, very similar to the Aurender. So much so that I returned the Aurender.

 

[iFi audio]

Now that I see you've taken on a new role as a sponsor I'm curious if you have been an employee since starting the thread or it happened in the course of.

In short, @Mr BubbaHyde has been super-helpful here on his own since the beginning of this thread. I've been seeing this and his super-kind replies for months, so recently I asked whether he'd like to officially join us and continue what he's been doing. He agreed and now there's two of us here

 

[twrr]

@iFi

Have you ever compared ZS against Auralic femto with lps ?

 

[iFi audio]

Have you ever compared ZS against Auralic femto with lps ?

We compare our products internally a lot, but we keep these comparisons under wraps. We believe it's best when users share their findings rather than us as the manufacturer

 

[twrr]

Ok, what do you thimk about Femto with Lps?

 

[Buddy Shagmore]

About 2 months in with mine...no issues at all. Connected via ethernet to my router. Streaming Tidal with ipad and my Schiit stack. Very happy enthusiast here.

 

[THUB]

I just received a ZS yesterday. My primary uses would be NAA and Spotify Connect. Both work great functionally. Yesterday, I tried internet radio, and couldn't get it working. I left it for a bit, and came back to it working. Then this morning I changed stations and that worked. Then I switched the ZS into NAA mode, and left it there all day. Now I switched back to AIO mode, and it looks like internet radio is working (track name changes), but I get no sound. Am I doing something wrong??

 

[endless402]

i have arrived...excuse the mess, too excited to test it out!

will also be interested to test it against my aurender n10

one weird thing is that on tidal, i turned on MQA passthrough but my Hugo 2 is still seeing 96khz...instead of 48khz

 

[Mr BubbaHyde]

i have arrived...excuse the mess, too excited to test it out!

will also be interested to test it against my aurender n10

one weird thing is that on tidal, i turned on MQA passthrough but my Hugo 2 is still seeing 96khz...instead of 48khz

Welcome to the NEO Club, lol...

Hope to see your impressions and thoughts over in the NEO Stream thread!

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/ifi-audio-neo-stream-sweet-streams.964997/

Cheers!!

 

[jnorris]

I'm considering purchasing a Zen Stream, but I need to know some things that no one has addressed yet. I'd like to use it as a music server as well as a streamer by connecting a 2TB SSD drive which contains files in FLAC, MP3, OPUS, WAV, WMA, M4A, DSF, and OGG. With OPUS and FLAC the most prevalent. Would anyone know A) is the Zen compatible with all these formats, and B) will it allow for searching (preferably by folder) and playing the files via an Android app. Any information would be helpful, thanks.