Best standalone music server?


So I am considering dipping my toes into the full digital world and was wondering what people here may consider as the best standalone music server, and here I am going to be specific.
I do not want to consider a home pc or mac based type of system at all!
Looking at adding one of the standalone models like for example the Wyred4sound ms1 or cocktail audio.
High on my list is ability to rip my cds directly at the unit itself, access to internet radio and other music apps (Pandora etc). High quality built in dac would be nice but if not then high quality digital out to run to an external dac. I will not be needing to access music files stored on another pc as my home pc is pretty old but fully functional for my simple needs. The only music looking to access from it right now are ripped cds and internet available music in whatever form.
So if it worked out well, yes it may be a replacement even for a cd player completely

Thank you
uberwaltz

Showing 1 response by rbstehno

Check out the auralic Aries. There is no internal disk because you don't want one in the unit. You get a 2TB disk now and what happens when you need more storage? How are you going to back it up? Another hard disk drive? Noise noise nois. Also, why would you ever need a 120GB buffer? You don't. You can load a song in memory in about a second. The Aries has an external power supply and a femto clock. Check the reviews from HI-FI+. The Aries also has the ability to connect external hard disks/ssd's. But you shouldn't have any hard disks in your audio room.
i setup a mac OS X server 100ft away from my audio room which has 10TB of usable disk space setup using raid 1. The Aries connects to this server by way of minimserver that runs on the OS X server. I use a GIg switched network so the latency is very low. I use xld to rip my songs and use Bliss to update the metadata. I use the OS X server for many other things besides running the minimserver. 
I also have the auralic mini in my living that connects to the central minimserver.