Intona high speed USB galvanic isolator

[Antoine]

Don't forget it's primarily an industrial product which happens to work well (IME very well) in high-end audio to isolate a USB input from a computer/streamer.

Hi Antoine,

You mentioned elsewhere that you would have yours upgraded to work with the Mutec. Have you already done that or are you still waiting for Intona to be ready for this upgrade ?

Hi Swissbear, correct! I have been in contact with them two weeks ago and Daniel of Intona suggested that if I wasn't in a hurry (which I wasn't) to contact him again in 10-14 days to arrange the firmware update which requires me to send it back to Germany. Back then they already had a fix for the MC-3+ USB (since early February) but other fixes were being worked on so I would then also receive those.

These 14 days have now passed so I will contact him again soon. Have been quite busy but I think I will do this next week.

[james n]

I've got one between my Melco N1A and 120. Keith at Purite kindly let me borrow one to try out. The first one was not compatible with my setup - the Melco would not recognise the 120. After giving the led status details to Keith, Intona were very quick to update the firmware and sent me through another one directly within a few days. This worked perfectly so this is the one that i ended up demoing and eventually keeping. The Melco has a high quality USB output (and bettered my optimised Mac Mini easily) and the Intona takes it a step further. No extra power supplies to worry about, simple plug and play, hidden away at the bottom of my rack.

[GuillaumeB]

Not wishing to clutter poor Antoine's system thread further, I thought I'd start a fresh thread for the Intona.

Well, it arrived. Very fast shipping - ordered late Thursday night, was shipped from Germany at 9am Friday and had it plugged in this evening (Monday). It's as light as a feather, very plain, and, er, ain't no prettier in the flesh - but as Daniel at Intona very understandingly said 'it's what's in the box that counts'.

Well, does it improve my system's sound?

So does the box do anything?

Guillaume

[Hifi_swlon]

Not wishing to clutter poor Antoine's system thread further, I thought I'd start a fresh thread for the Intona.

Well, it arrived. Very fast shipping - ordered late Thursday night, was shipped from Germany at 9am Friday and had it plugged in this evening (Monday). It's as light as a feather, very plain, and, er, ain't no prettier in the flesh - but as Daniel at Intona very understandingly said 'it's what's in the box that counts'.

Well, does it improve my system's sound?

So does the box do anything?

Guillaume

I was saving putting anything on paper until I'd done the 'remove it and see if I miss it' test.

Annoyingly, after a crazy work week I had to pack the hifi down as we had some building work done in the lounge right next to the hifi and I was worried a builder might accidentally sticking a piece of wood through one of the speaker drivers or something....

Should have it back up tomorrow so looks like the weekend....

[Hifi_swlon]

OK, it's staying.  To be honest I've had nowhere near enough time to do hifi stuff this week, so partly it's staying because I need more time with it so will lose the option of returning it which is OK as it's an experiment after all. I also ordered a Aqvox USB cable so I could test if that made a difference, and it's just arrived. Well, if I'm believing this stuff - and I've at least convinced myself of a reasonably plausible science/technology logic - then using the Intona means introducing another USB cable into the chain, and the best other one I had was the green Audioquest.

Anyway, on to the important bit.... If I had to summarise so far, I'd say more analogue and less aggressive sound, with more detail. At one point I was really quite 'wowed', but on removal not as much as expected was lost, so clearly there's some expectation bias there (I guess I read too much and was rooting for it). That said, I'm certain it's doing something good, and will try and do a bit more listening in the evenings this week. One slight negative I perceive is a lessening of bass 'fullness' which from what I've read could well be due to removal of noise. What is this 'audiophile' curse of taking away much needed bass at every turn? I'm not running Dirac at the moment due to the output selection problem, so would love to set that up again for these tests - think that's a few weeks off though.

If I sound a bit wishy-washy, that's partly due to the fact  I've listened unusually little this past week, and on top of that we had a new sofa delivered which is much more padded, and I felt that made quite a difference to the rooms sound (better) before the Intona. I also took the system apart completely and moved it, and although I did tape out the speaker positions pretty well, I also made an adjustment to try and move the soundstage back a bit. Plus we had shutters installed on the window behind. So all-in-all, probably enough changes to the room to affect the sound quite a lot.

I'll try and report back again next week. Whatever happens, someone's gotta come up with an aftermarket case for it if it's staying, or it's going to have to go in the floor behind something. Intona say its for industrial use and not audio (despite their website bizarrely being pretty much purely about audio from what I can gather), but even so - the case is too big for what's inside, and plain old fashioned and ugly.

Lack of listening time on the Intona wasn't helped by the fact that this weekend I discovered Somafm 'groove salad' station on internet radio, and found it hard to pull myself away from that streamed through the chromecast audio - it's like it was programmed just for me and it sounds pretty good despite the 64Aac stream. I've got a feeling that's going to bring me far more pleasure than a USB cable and box of tricks.

[kjj11]

Just received and connect Intona Standard version
It works! I try UpTone Regen and return it (price/quality improving not acceptable for me) - but Intona remains in my system
Adding more bass punch and adding more holographic trebles
Quality improve more than with expensive USB cables
Great product

[Antoine]

Don't have mine anymore but just sharing; Audiostream review of the Intona:

http://www.audiostream.com/content/inton...d-isolator

[Axel]

Don't have mine anymore but just sharing; Audiostream review of the Intona:

http://www.audiostream.com/content/inton...d-isolator

No, that's because I've got it! Hi Antoine! Thanks for posting this as it reinforces the benefits that I've heard. The first thing I noticed was the widening and deepening of the soundstage and it sounded as if another veil had been lifted from the music. I must admit that I've been using a cheapo cable on the output of the Intona, but I'm going to upgrade this with a 20cm cable from Curious. Are there any other makes you can recommend?

Cheers!

Alex.

[baddog]

Thanks for sharing - blacker backgrounds and wider, deeper soundstage. With only one caveat, "The problem with all of these devices that I have reviewed is that they are DAC specific in terms of sound and function."

[Antoine]

Don't have mine anymore but just sharing; Audiostream review of the Intona:

http://www.audiostream.com/content/inton...d-isolator

No, that's because I've got it! Hi Antoine! Thanks for posting this as it reinforces the benefits that I've heard. The first thing I noticed was the widening and deepening of the soundstage and it sounded as if another veil had been lifted from the music. I must admit that I've been using a cheapo cable on the output of the Intona, but I'm going to upgrade this with a 20cm cable from Curious. Are there any other makes you can recommend?

Cheers!

Alex.

Hi Alex, I know you do and glad to see you're enjoying the Intona!

Sorry, the thing I dislike most in this hobby is comparing and shopping for cables. I tend to go for cables that are popular and have some consensus of being good. That's how I got the Curious and the TotalDAC D1 before it. I like the Curious cables more in my system, they seem to have less of a character of their own than the TotalDAC which tended to be a bit 'dark'/less transparant although some people even consider the Curious to be warm sounding. It's all terribly subjective and system dependant so YMMV but there are lots of USB cable shootouts on the Internet if you need some 'inspiration'.