Networked Media Player.


There have been a number of threads which have explicitly discussed the issues of spooling audio files from a PC to a pre-amp. A number of members have suggested using either an external USB (such as the now defunct stereolink- which I currently use for my headphone system) or a high end audio PCI card preferably with a digital out.
Both of these options require a PC to be within easy reach of the pre-amp or listening area.
A third option is to use a Networked Media player such as the squeezebox or audiotron to interface between a remote PC and your listening station / high end gear by either wifi or ethernet. I have used both the squeezebox and audiotron to greater or lesser success’s but have yet to find one that matches all of my criteria:
1. Digital out
2. Can spool multiple file formats, MP3, WAV, FLAC etc
3. Looks great and not like some cheap molded plastic gizmo that was hatched in someone’s basement – see SLIMP3, predecessor to the squeezebox.

Has anyone experimented or stumbled across other such devices and what have there experiences been?
Current options are:
1. Roku http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/index.php
2. Joyport 2 http://www.joyfaktory.com/index.html

Thanks
extra_action

Showing 2 responses by edesilva

I've actually got four 250 GB Lacie USB 2.0 drives. I had the space, and it was a bit cheaper than going with one humungous drive. Had some issues with the fact that they showed up formatted FAT32, but I reformatted as NTFS and it works better with my XP system. I've got a pair hooked up to a Linksys NAS box (just an ethernet port with a pair of USB 2.0 inputs).

Had some bad experiences before with the Maxstor external drives.
I've got a bunch of audiotrons in my house that served me in good stead for background music (mp3s). But, I wanted to trim down my CD collection, and thought the ATs wouldn't work for me because I wanted losslessly encoded audio *and* tagging. Turns out that (whee!) I seem to have missed some AT development--the Turtle Beach folks now have a new piece of software that "tags" WAVs files in a manner that the AT can read 'em! So, I'm now the owner of 1TB of disk storage...