Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

another option is to go from your mac using the toslink output to an external dac. for my whole house audio (except for my dedicated audio room), i use a mac front end and airport express wireless units that use the toslink out to front end gear. i then use a macbook to control itunes from other locations in the house. you can also use the ipod touch or iphone to remotely control a mac itunes server.

you don't need a pc, mac's have a much better operating system. with 4 macs, you can do a lot of cool stuff for a distributed whole house music system. you can share your itunes from 1 central mac, you can have each mac in a different room playing different itunes selections, you can use airport express devices wired or wireless to help in distributing the music, you can hook up an external dac between you mac or the airport express for better quality sound, and on and on. this is what i'm using for all my rooms except for my dedicated audio room. someday, i might put an itunes feed into it.

Dbphd, in my dedicated audio room, i use all Classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers. i have my den setup using totem speakers, dk design amp, sony dvp9000es cd/sacd player, and the airport express hooked up thru my wireless network. a mac mini is my music server using itunes. i also have another system in my living room that has a multi source multi output receiver with an airport express that allows me to get my itunes music to my living room and to the outside speakers. my macbook can control the itunes on my mac mini from any location in the house.
future plans are purchasing an external dac for my den that the sony cd player and the airport express will plug into.
IMO, if you are looking at purchasing external hard drives for your pc, you need to get a couple or buy a RAID setup so you will have no single point of failure. i have a friend that lost his disk drive and his purchased itunes (worth $3600) was wiped out. if you need 500gb now, buy a terabyte drive, you will use it faster than you think. right now, i have multiple 500gb drives and each 500gb drive is backed up to another 500gb drive daily. leopard comes with time machine that automatically backs up your data. i'm in the process of purchasing a multi-terabyte RAID disk subsystem that will allow me to get rid of a few 500gb drives and have 1 disk subsystem that is fault tolerant using RAID 5 technology.

Ckorody - i have approx 1500 cd's, 20 sacd's, and hundreds of albums. i use the mini for my browsing the net, for work, and it is also used as a music and file server for the other macs in the house. all the macs backup there disks to the multiple 500gb drives attached to the mini.
i work out of my home so i have a decent audio setup in my den: dk design, sony dvp9000es, nikko fm tuner, an adcom gda-700 dac (just purchased tonight), totem speakers, definitive technology sub, and an airport express which is hooked up to the adcom dac. the sony is also hooked up to the dac.
i have a dedicated audio room that has all classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers.

the 500gb drives are hooked up by firewire. i have been looking to purchase a NAS multi-terabyte storage system that will allow me to use raid 10 or raid 5. there was a unit on ebay that just went for $600 for a 2 terabyte unit. if i buy this NAS unit, i can hook this up in a closet with a network connection and i can get rid of all the 500gb drives i have on my desk.
btw: the adcom dac really cleaned up the sound that was coming out of the airport express. smooth, and had to turn the subwoofer down a bit, the bass was more there.

nas is the way to go for storage. imo, get a 4 drive nas system and use raid-5 to setup the nas. this will allow you to use 3 out of the 4 drives for data. even if you go with nas, you will still need a backup. any computer piece can and will fail. if you don't back it up, be sure you won't lose anything valuable.
here is what my den setup consists of:
totem speakers, definitive technology supercube sub, nikko fm tuner, sony dvp9000es dvd/cd/sacd player, dk design vs-1, adcom gda-700 dac, audio alchemy dti, mac mini running itunes, and airport express in multiple rooms. i go from the sony player and the airport express into the dti unit (cleans up the jitter), then out of the dti to the dac. sounds very good. there was a big improvement using the external dac and an improvement again using the dti.
as for distributing music to other rooms, i have airport express unit hooked up wired and wireless to other systems and i currently control them with my macbook. the macbook allows me to control the mac mini from other rooms to run selections from itunes. i am in the middle of buying an ipod touch which i will use to control the mac mini running itunes from other parts of the house instead of using the macbook.