Apple TV vs Wadia 170i?

I just wish Apple would make a really cool audiophile class component out of stainless steel or aluminum that had a huge terabyte size hard drive and coax and optical outs.

I have been experimenting with wireless access from my mac mini to a LaCie 1 TB 2big NAS drive in RAID1 (mirrored data - i.e. it has two 1 TB drives) coupled to the latest CISCO Wireless Gigabit router. The audio is stored lossless and I send the audio wireless to an Airport Express with optical out to the Benchmark DAC1.

I needed this kind of storage because I went lossless and I need up to 3,000 CD storage capability with absolute insurance that is backed up.

FWIW this works. Depending on your other gear you may or may not like the DAC1 at all - it is a very flat and transparent device so it won't compensate for any room or other issues in the setup. I think it works better with silk dome tweeters as opposed to metal domes (as Macdad points out the clarity is such that it could be all too bright when coupled with a speaker/room that is leaning towards bright)

The Benchmark DAC1 is not a "transparent device,"

This seems to go against the majority of conclusions and test measurements, as well as my own observations. FWIW - upsampling is used in many D to A devices. It would be difficult to explain Time Series Analysis or Signal Processing here (it is usually a 3rd of 4th year engineering) but I can assure you that upsampling will not change the signal but it can help improve S/N and remove reconstruction artifacts in the D to A, in a good implementation of course.