This is a review and detailed measurements of the Intona USB 3.0 (compatible with 2.0) Isolator. It is on kind loan from a member. It costs US $360.
If you have been around here you know of a number of "audio" companies selling USB filters, cleaners, regenerators, etc. I have shown all of these to have no value at all and in some cases, actually making things worse. Intona is different. They have been building these isolators for industrial applications where a high voltage device is being controlled over USB and you need full isolation in case something goes bad (you don't want that high voltage to travel back through USB to your computer). Folks landed upon them and started to use their products to "improve" USB DAC audio.
The Intona 3.0 has no bling which is fine with me:
The back side has the connectors you expect:
Look carefully and you notice that there is no input for power supply. The Intona uses the incoming USB power and regenerates it on the isolated side. This is very good because there is no risk of ground loops created (common problem with typical USB audio tweaks with external power). And of course much more convenient to use.
Also, until recently all such isolators were USB 2.0 so having a 3.0 version is quite cool. Not that this matters with Audio DACs since they almost all are USB 2.0. And that is how I tested the Intona.
Audio Measurements
I literally spent hours trying to find DAC whose performance could be improved with this device. None of the high-end DACs cared one way or the other. They continued to work just as well as they did without Intona. After much frustration, I pulled out my old and discontinued Schiit Modi 2 USB which I know is sensitive to USB (power) noise and managed to eek out a bit of difference. Here is the Modi 2 directly hooked up to my PC:
The main tone at 1 kHz is all that we want to see. Instead we have some harmonic distortion (to be expected) and a ton of other junk from low to high frequencies. Here is what happens when I route the USB cable through Intona:
We still have the spray of that junk but the floor of them has moved down. That impact improves SINAD by just 0.4 dB which is nothing to write home about.
The inline nature of the Intona has a light cost in that it saps some USB power resulting in slightly reduced output level in the Modi 2 (from 1.62 volts to 1.56 volts).
That's all I have for you all.
Oh wait, the owner wanted to know if it added latency to pipeline. This is tricky business to measure. The PC is not a real-time system. My analyzer sends bits over ASIO interface to USB/DAC and that interface has its own latencies. In addition, the Audio Precision analyzer lacks a simple delay measurement for digital sources. There is a test that can approximate it but has its own quirks. After some struggle, I managed to get somewhat reliable latency numbers:
Whatever latency the Intona adds must be in microseconds and lost in the noise of latency elsewhere. So I would not worry about it.
Conclusions
Intona knows what they are doing when it comes to proper, professional USB isolators. As much as audiophiles are running to them to buy their products, I cannot recommend it for this application. Any half-decent DAC -- and I am talking $99 and above -- produces great performance by filtering its own USB power. And isolating its digital stream from the DAC output.
What is that? You hear an improvement? Have a loved one put the isolator in and out of the loop of the USB connection 10 times. If you can tell reliably 8 out of 10 times and can document it in a video, I will pay you $350 so you can buy this product. Otherwise, it is not the spoon that is bending. It is you!
Think hard as to whether you want to live in the Matrix or reality. The choice is yours!
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Need mulch for the garden. I am too cheap to buy them in bags so I plan to chip them myself from the branches around the yard. Have a chipper already. But I need gas money for it. So please donate what you can using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
If you have been around here you know of a number of "audio" companies selling USB filters, cleaners, regenerators, etc. I have shown all of these to have no value at all and in some cases, actually making things worse. Intona is different. They have been building these isolators for industrial applications where a high voltage device is being controlled over USB and you need full isolation in case something goes bad (you don't want that high voltage to travel back through USB to your computer). Folks landed upon them and started to use their products to "improve" USB DAC audio.
The Intona 3.0 has no bling which is fine with me:
The back side has the connectors you expect:
Look carefully and you notice that there is no input for power supply. The Intona uses the incoming USB power and regenerates it on the isolated side. This is very good because there is no risk of ground loops created (common problem with typical USB audio tweaks with external power). And of course much more convenient to use.
Also, until recently all such isolators were USB 2.0 so having a 3.0 version is quite cool. Not that this matters with Audio DACs since they almost all are USB 2.0. And that is how I tested the Intona.
Audio Measurements
I literally spent hours trying to find DAC whose performance could be improved with this device. None of the high-end DACs cared one way or the other. They continued to work just as well as they did without Intona. After much frustration, I pulled out my old and discontinued Schiit Modi 2 USB which I know is sensitive to USB (power) noise and managed to eek out a bit of difference. Here is the Modi 2 directly hooked up to my PC:
The main tone at 1 kHz is all that we want to see. Instead we have some harmonic distortion (to be expected) and a ton of other junk from low to high frequencies. Here is what happens when I route the USB cable through Intona:
We still have the spray of that junk but the floor of them has moved down. That impact improves SINAD by just 0.4 dB which is nothing to write home about.
The inline nature of the Intona has a light cost in that it saps some USB power resulting in slightly reduced output level in the Modi 2 (from 1.62 volts to 1.56 volts).
That's all I have for you all.
Oh wait, the owner wanted to know if it added latency to pipeline. This is tricky business to measure. The PC is not a real-time system. My analyzer sends bits over ASIO interface to USB/DAC and that interface has its own latencies. In addition, the Audio Precision analyzer lacks a simple delay measurement for digital sources. There is a test that can approximate it but has its own quirks. After some struggle, I managed to get somewhat reliable latency numbers:
Whatever latency the Intona adds must be in microseconds and lost in the noise of latency elsewhere. So I would not worry about it.
Conclusions
Intona knows what they are doing when it comes to proper, professional USB isolators. As much as audiophiles are running to them to buy their products, I cannot recommend it for this application. Any half-decent DAC -- and I am talking $99 and above -- produces great performance by filtering its own USB power. And isolating its digital stream from the DAC output.
What is that? You hear an improvement? Have a loved one put the isolator in and out of the loop of the USB connection 10 times. If you can tell reliably 8 out of 10 times and can document it in a video, I will pay you $350 so you can buy this product. Otherwise, it is not the spoon that is bending. It is you!
Think hard as to whether you want to live in the Matrix or reality. The choice is yours!
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Need mulch for the garden. I am too cheap to buy them in bags so I plan to chip them myself from the branches around the yard. Have a chipper already. But I need gas money for it. So please donate what you can using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
