Music Servers & Sonos. XiVA Music M8, W4S ?

One other thing I was wondering and frankly it never occurred tome to ask, but why do you want the W4S Server?? I assumed all along that it's so you can listen to HiRes downloads. But if you aren't interested in that you only really need the Sonos and a good Dac to get great sound.. The Sonos with the right Dac does sound really good all by it's self.. In fact depending on your budget you could get the new PS Audio PWD MKII which now has class leading jitter reduction, that with a Sonos will sound amazing, and if you decide that you do want to do HiRes you could just add the PS Audio Bridge which turns the PWD into a full fledged music server. You'd still want to keep your music on a NAS, but the Sonos and the PWD would both pull from the NAS. Only time a computer would come into play is ripping CD's. Just a thought.

Erik

Thats a GREAT option, I had not been aware of before.

Will the PS Audio work with ITunes?

I will likely still use ITunes for ripping my CDs and buying a majority of my music.

Yes I know ITunes is not perfect but its just easiest and works best for my as I have an IPhone, IPad, 2 Mac Books in the house and going to get a Mac Desktop sometime in the future.

Look into the Bryston BDP-1 digital music player.I hate computers, do not believe in computer based music quality or ease, but this unit is easy to operate and sounds incredible. Simply moved my iTunes music onto a HDD, connected to BDP-1 and voila! I was skeptical but now am a believer.

Neal

Erikminer, i agree about sonos pwd. I use the same combo with the bridge. Have you upgraded the pwd to version 2? Did it improve the sonos quality?

The PS Audio will work the about the same as Sonos does with iTunes.. In that neither really "works" with iTunes as I think you're thinking. Sonos looks to the iTunes library and copies an index of it to play.. The PS Audio also uses "shares" I understand your question is based on ease of use so I'll just answer yes, sort of.

If you are on a PC I'd strongly recommend using DBpoweramp to rip.. If you're on a Mac I'd use XLD..there are numerous reason why but the biggest is the way iTunes creates files.. Once you get to that point you can try them out and you understand that ripping with iTunes isn't the best choice, it's fine as music manager.