Hick-ups
Contents
At the front of the Grimm MU1 there is a colour display. That display will show – if all works correctly – title information, sampling rate and some information about volume and input. Now we had a fight with the display, because if we set the MU1 as Roon endpoint, the title information does not come through. A phone call learns that this has to do with an extension in Roon that is not yet working properly when multiple Roon servers are active in the network. The display will work if we set up the MU1 as a Roon server. Work is in progress on the extension.
We set up the MU1 as a Roon server. Most MU1 owners will do the same, so no problem. It is possible to connect external drives to the MU1 via USB. Or use an (optional) internal drive. But we simply set our Synology-NAS (DS1618+, 12GB RAM, 10Gbit) as the source, add Tidal and … yes: after indexing our library, we play with the MU1 as a Roon server.
If we enter the menu by pressing the button on top for a longer period of time, we can then scroll through the menu items by turning it. That’s a little slow. Too slow in our opinion. That too – we learn after a phone call – is going to be fixed soon by Grimm. The slow response takes away the premium feel for us. So it’s a good thing they’re working on it.
In the menu we can now do a few things: see the software status, turn the upsampler on and off, put the player in standby and get a short explanation of the menu. More things will be added later. Think about settings for the upsampler.
My hope is that there will be more than just a slight sonic improvement. Noting that the Weiss 501 will up sample to 195Mhz and use its own low jitter clock, on data it receives from the Grimm via AES/EBU connection.
Hi Jaap, great review.
I know you have reviewed both the MU1 and Weiss DAC 501. I’m wondering if you had ever paired the MU1 with the Weiss and could offer your impressions? I have a Weiss DAC501 Mk 2 version and am very interested in the Grimm product.