Innuos Next-Gen FLOW

The Next-Gen FLOW is a dedicated USB master reclocker — a small CNC-machined aluminium chassis whose only job is to sit between an Innuos server and the customer's DAC and hand the digital signal across in a state the receiving DAC has rarely been offered before. The signal is reclocked. The signal is regenerated. The signal arrives at the DAC with greater focus, realism, and accuracy than the source chassis alone is built to deliver.

The engineering case is straightforward. The clock that times the digital signal sets the ceiling on what the downstream DAC can do; the power supply feeding the clock sets the ceiling on the clock. The Next-Gen FLOW houses an ultra-precise three-parts-per-billion oven-controlled crystal oscillator — the OCXO Innuos selected as the reference clock for the Next-Gen tier — and powers it from a dedicated Next-Gen-level supply built around a 300-volt-amp transformer, ARC6 active rectification, and CX regulators isolating the clock's rail from anything else inside the chassis. The clock sits in the calm such a supply makes for it, and what reaches the customer's DAC is the timing the DAC was built to be given and is rarely given.

The Next-Gen FLOW is built around the modular concept Innuos brought down from the NazaréFLOW above it. The chassis accepts FLOW modules — dedicated boards that implement the native digital protocol of specific DACs. Innuos's first announced modules target MSB, CH Precision, EMMLabs, and Soulution DACs by name. The customer who owns one of these reference DACs orders the matching module at the same time as the chassis and the FLOW addresses that DAC in the DAC's own language rather than through the lowest-common-denominator USB pathway. The customer with a DAC outside that list orders the chassis as a USB master reclocker — the FLOW is compatible with any USB source — and adds the module when their DAC's protocol becomes a published FLOW option.

The chassis itself is the engineering Innuos brings to every Next-Gen product. A CNC-machined aluminium body, finished to the standard of the rest of the system, designed to share a rack with a reference DAC, a reference streamer, and a reference amplifier and to look correct doing it. The FLOW is the natural expansion to the ZEN Next-Gen, the ZENith Next-Gen, or the STATEMENT — the chassis that arrives after the streamer is in place and the customer has heard what the rest of the system can do when the timing of the digital signal is given the same care as the rest of the audio chain.