Affordable "audiophile" network player?

mac mini running pure music. can't beat it. why buy a squeezebox when you need a computer anyway, doesn't make sense. get a used intel based 1.66 or 1.8 ghz mac mini at the minimum and max out the memory. you can run snow leopard on it. you can get an airport express or apple tv if you want to setup remote rooms with the mac being your music server. for your main listening room, you will need a good external dac, and for your other rooms for background music, you can use an internal dac in a receiver or get a cheaper dac for better sound quality. this will give you a system that you can grow.

Affordable " audiophile " , thats an oxymoron .

Looks like we have some Squeezbox fans here... please help me understand why everyone loves these so much. I'm with Rbstehno on this: don't you still need a computer and a DAC?

$500 will buy you an Oppo 93, which will do what you want (disclaimer, the music library management functionality is extremely limited - basically you work from your directory structure. You need a DLNA server on your network). However, for this $500 you also get a SOTA blu ray player, netflix streaming, you can stream not only music, but also your pictures and video clips.

Squeezebox touch still needs a computer to access the stored music since the computer runs the software and most likely a dac too that betters the touch's inboard dac.