
- Ifi zen stream tidal connect upgrade#
- Ifi zen stream tidal connect full#
- Ifi zen stream tidal connect software#
Everyone should review the functionality list against their desired use case. Lacking specific functionality you require is a more serious issue. Ultimately these mean little since the user interaction is fully locked down.
Ifi zen stream tidal connect full#
The Zen Stream firmware from currently uses a mixture of components based on a Linux 4.4 kernel, a Debian file system, and a subset of several Volumio libraries rather than a full OS.
Ifi zen stream tidal connect software#
But it keeps costs down and the advanced cryptographic functionality is supplied by their own software and plugin encryption board so it really doesn’t matter. Much of the hardware encryption boxes used in banking produced by Safenet cost upward of $25k and internally they are just 25 year old Pentium 3 processors running a Linux kernel from the late 90s. You’d be surprised what old platforms and indeed hardware goes into some brand new kit. That is basically an in-situ brain transplant as far as firmware goes.
Ifi zen stream tidal connect upgrade#
But I have supported an appliance where the internal structure was UNIX based on Illumos and went entirely to a Linux kernel from a regular upgrade package. Whether ifi choose to do a massive upgrade or not is another matter. It is also not necessarily true that it cannot be upgraded. In the case of the Zen Stream, the OS itself will not be a limiting factor in the functionality that ifi choose to overlay on top of Volumio.

An appliance maker selects an OS based on a number of factors. Generally, no one cares which Linux kernel their router or switch runs. At the appliance level (which this certainly is), the OS is really just considered firmware. But on an appliance that is essentially black box, the consumer really shouldn’t care or need to know. An aging OS is certainly an issue on more open devices where the operations performed by the end user and their required support level is largely open ended. I’ve worked in the area of computing appliances for the best part of 2 decades now. Though, they offered a full replacement of the whole package fairly quickly. Although I had planned on replacing it with a LPS either way, having both a non ifi PSU and a broken one at that wasn’t a great customer experience. Good that it seems to be working for some of you though but there are a lot of unhappy users out there to.

Having had Ifi kit before and experiencing their poor service I would never buy anything else from them. They even had the the stickers on boxes saying it was included. They initially gave their own psus then for some reason stopped and bunged in cheaper ones and claimed it was for a limited period which was never announced. I know lots of users that have had it bricked with firmware upgrades too and early firmware was very unreliable.

It still only uses Roon Bridge and Chromecast support has been dropped. The main issue with Zen Stream is Ifis poor support and the fact they built it on a really old Kernel so the main linux system it runs on can’t be upgraded any more so if things change with Tidal connect and librespot that need a newer Kernel than those could likely stop working.Īlso they have failed to deliver on two key features, Roon Ready and Chromecast.
