Computer Do Over

See my earlier thread. In short. Im a mac guy (much prefer them), however when setup right windows sounds better (compared with two mac mini - so same hardware one running 10.6 one running bootcamp / xp). Using foobar, and ASIO there is simply no comparison once you tweak the buffers and settings in asio in windows. Its smoother, less grainy, with more depth. Mac is far from bad though.

If your unwilling to tweak or use asio, others here are right. mac is better. if your willing to tinker some, you can get much farther.

Id look at one of the fanless pc setups at mitxpc.com cheap, and no fan.

ps. Forgot to add. I have had much better luck with USB2 (m2tech) and firewire devices that are directly connected compared to wireless devices like the squeezebox.

If you plan on using the squeezebox... i doubt windows / mac matters at all since squeezebox is using the network not a direct connection.

The new Mac Mini to be released in the next 3 months well have HDMI. I would imagine Audio/Video straming of your Itunes Libary to your Home Theater well be very very nice.
Just a thought

Keep in mind that if you do decide to expand in to video streaming (I assume from the post that this is audio only) the MACs dont support Bluray and there is no forecast for when they will. If you go audio or non BR then pick your fav.

gmood1 - if you are going to compare machines, you need to compare all of the machine, not just the cases. the pc's you listed are baby machines: small ram, slow processors, and i didn't see any cd/dvd drives included. compare that to the mini that has firewire, superdrive, 4gb ram, toslink, usb, etc...
sure a mac costs more, but you also get much more. as for a tower over a mini: why? what can a tower do that a mini can't in the world of music server? i don't want my hard drives in the machine, i want them separate from the box. if you want a tower, get a mac pro with 2 g5 processors, huge power supply, and you can get them used for $500-$600 on craigslist.

audioguru1 - how can you say that a pc is better than a mac for audio? if all you do is use the mac to read data off the hard drive and you let an external jitter device and dac handle all of the conversion, it is a bold statement saying a pc is better. i had a guy at rmaf tell me that a certain hard drive sounded better than other hard drives. This guy was full of S*&^. you also hear people say that ssd sound better than hdd. Again, this is also BS! i have seen many "custom" pc machines at ces and RMAF that were many thousands of $$$, but the best music server (pc/mac based) that i have heard was using a mac with the amarra software.