Computer music server PC or Apple????

the setup in my den consists of: totem speakers, definitive technology supercube sub, sony 9000es dvd/cd/sacd, nikko fm tuner, dk design vs-1, adcom gda-700 dac, audio alchemy dti, mac mini, and airport express. i have both the dvp9000es and the airport express hooked up to the dti to cleanup the jitter, and then a digital cable from the dti to the dac.
i have other rooms in the house with airport express units hooked up to receivers in those rooms. i have my macbook control the mac mini running itunes from the other parts of the house (wireless). i'm purchasing an ipod touch that will also allow me to control the mac mini running itunes from anywhere in the house using remote buddy.
once the mac mini is up and running, you don't need the keyboard or mouse any longer. put the mini in the rac with your equipment and use the toslink cable from the mac mini to an external dac or use the cable from the mini with rca terminations hooked up straight into your preamp/receiver.
i use apple's airport express devices (wireless or wired) to distribute music to the whole house. you can tell itunes which speakers you want to play.
i think if you get a good quality external dac with toslink input, you will be happy. i did hookup my digital transmission interface between the mac or airport express and the external dac and the sound was more fluid, more bass, more clean.
there are other options too. also, you need another disk drive to backup the 500gb disk you have. use the internal mac drive for your operating system, and programs, use the 500gb drive for all your data, documents, itunes stuff, etc... and then get another 500gb drive or larger and backup both of these disks to it each night. use time machine with leopard, it does it automatically once you set it up.
don't use a laptop, they get too hot and the heat will damage the laptop after a while. my macbook get really warm after a couple hours usage.
if all you are going to use the mini for is an audio server, you can get an older one, you don't need the core duo intel processor. if you want to run applications on here besides itunes and if you think you will need to win windows (why go backwards), then go for the newer intel models. i have all intel macs and use either parallels or vmware to run linux,solaris, or windows (i have 1 app that needs windows).
if you think you might want to use this server as a whole house central server to run your file/print/itunes/hvac/security system/etc.., go for the macpro or older power mac, these are made for 24x365 servers.
good luck.

i just read the review in stereophile on the new benchmark dac with usb. the reviewer also used a mac mini as a transport and compared the newer dac to the older benchmark dac without usb (also to a bel canto). he stated that he liked the sound of the toslink hookup better than the usb hookup.

if i was looking to purchase a dac and it came with a usb port at no extra charge, why not go for it. if you have to pay extra for the usb port or they have to take away a toslink/rca/balanced port to put the usb in, i wouldn't do it, it might limit you in the future. I also would not make a statement that usb ports are better than toslink because of jitter issues. Simply not true in all cases. You need to listen for yourself to see if you can hear the difference.

hi steve, i wouldn't say that just because its 24 bit that it will be better than the 16 or 20 bit dacs. when i did evals of dacs around 2 years ago, i liked the 20 bit dacs more than the 24 bit ones. i evaluated a few 24bit and a few 20 bit and ended up with an audio research 20bit dac. i have seen other threads stating the same. Bottom line, an eval needs to take place using their own equipment and whatever sounds the best to them, they should pursue it.

vista is terrible, unstable, slow, kludgy, typical microsoft. i have had 3 users come up to me asking how they can go back to xp. the problem going back to xp on new machines is the vendors are not supporting xp on the newer machines and when you try to install the xp OS, you get errors. there are ways around this but it is a hassle.

now for mac releases, i had leopard up and running on all my macs in a couple hours after the official release. plus leopard is so much more advanced than anything windows has. (just my opinion).