The future for a current Squeezebox user

I agree that there is no hurry to change. But I will continue to lose functionality in the Internet radio arena, as new things like Beats audio are unsupported and the company has said they are not working on a Squeezebox interface. It's viewed as a dead market from their concern.

I likely still have several years left before making a move, and who knows what will change in that time period, but I'm trying to gauge what options might be reasonable now.

Michael

Erik,

Thanks for the response. Yes, you're right, things do change quickly and therefore I will need to continually reassess the market to see what might be best for eventually replacing my Squeeezebox-based system.

The Bluesound sounds really interesting. It's something to watch, anyway. And I'll have to look into the Auralic, as well, since you say that it can use the LMS.

Michael

As a follow-up to resurrect my thread from several years ago, I just recently built a Roon endpoint using an Intel NUC8i3BEK kit, added 8GB of memory and a small M.2 SSD to it, and installed Roon's ROCK system.

Very straightforward for around $300 total, and I'm getting high-resolution (up to 192K) transfer from Roon to my HT receiver via HDMI.  I can also now use multi-channel audio for the first time.

Roon works OK with my Squeezeboxes, as well, but it's forced to downsample some of the high-resolution audio files.  Not with the new unit that I built.

So at the moment the combination of Roon (hosted on my Linux server where Logitech Media Server used to be) and a home-built Roon endpoint using an Intel NUC purchased off Amazon is my current solution to streaming audio.

Michael

Hi Mark,
I've had the CAL Alpha/Delta combination (actually, I think I still have them in a box somewhere).  That's a classic transport/DAC combination that is still well-regarded.
What you'll need is a way of getting the data from the FLAC files to the Alpha DAC.  With a CD, your Delta transport sends PCM data from the transport to the DAC over one of a few different cable options (optical, coaxial, AES/EBU, etc).  Now you need a device that basically does the same thing as the Delta but rather than reading from CD's it reads from your computer's FLAC files.
So you'll effectively need two things:
1)  A repository for FLAC files.  This is usually a computer that you have some software running as essentially a media server.  You can use Logitech Media Server (LMS), as detailed on this thread, or other software such as Roon.  Either way, you point the software to the directory on your computer that contains all of your music files in FLAC format.
2)  An "endpoint", or "player" that can interact with the server, receive and decode the FLAC data and then send the digital music data to the DAC.  I don't think the Alpha has a USB port, as it's from the 1990's, so you'll need a device that can connect to a network like ethernet to communicate with the server, and also have a coaxial or Toslink data connection that can then go to the Alpha.  
Just to provide one example, you could get a Raspberry Pi-based unit like a DigiOne from allo.com.  (https://www.allo.com/sparky-eu/digione.html) 

Having a digital media repository has dramatically enhanced my ability to appreciate and find music in my collection, so be persistent and don't get discouraged if it doesn't work the first time.
Michael