Music server quality.

I've been considering too...and the thing is it appears to me a lot of servers are actually made by non tradtional audiophile companies.....but that may not be a bad thing: for me the most important thing will be storage space, user interface and digital outputs given I will be using my dac. There is the sooloos system for example. Sounds interesting to me as it has terabyte capacity! Oliver is another.

Then there are PC based systems such as Squeezebox, Sonos etc...the question on these are not the quality (again if you use the digital outputs to a good DAC) but to me the fact that PCs tend to crash. I do have the Sonos. The positive is these are generally not a very expensive option (obviously using Airport Express is very cheap though it doess suffer in quality). A very interesting development is msb tech developing a IPOD cradle which charges the IPOD, and they configure your IPOD to actually have a digital out. The IPOD then becomes a remote control, sending uncompressed digital wirelessly to a base station of sorts which in turn can be hooked up to your dac.

I also hear Arcam has come out with one.

If you pockets are deep enough, here another one:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue28/novaphysics_memoryplayer.htm

Henryhk,
The Arcam would be expected to be a good unit, I suppose.

Kana813,
My pockets are not that deep. (My grave might be deep if I bought one and "forgot" to tell my wife.)

I guess I just don't get the packaged server products. Are they for people who are afraid of computers?

What do they do that a simple Mac running i-tunes can't do, cheaper? That is, assuming that you want to use your own dac? I have a squeezebox, but it doesn't sound nearly as good as the mac going straight into the dac with the optical output. Am I missing something here?