Music Server

 I use a dedicated Mac Mini, and external hard drive, Roon, and a PS audio PWD MKII  with  PS audio bridge 2.    I'm very pleased with the set up,  but I'm not sure I would recommend it to someone who feels that they are not very computer savvy. 

 Roon is an essential component in my opinion!  I suggest visiting the Roon website and browsing The list of Roon ready components to see if there is an option you haven't yet encountered or considered. 

 Good luck! 

What *IS* it with people who have so much money they feel they need to spend it on something that costs 30 times as what they need to spend? Antipodes is based upon Fedora 20, the experimenter’s version of Redhat Linux. It is not something that will stay stable and supported for more than 3 years. I realize that a lot of people don’t mind dropping $600 on a cell phone that will be obsolete in 2 years, but Antipodes retails at something like $7500.

And while we’re at it, a Linux server is not some special people of exotic circuitry with magical geometry wiring and platinum plated gold bus bars. It’s a PC. You know. The kind of thing Dell sells for $300.

I run an HP laptop which is at least 7 years old that I paid $150 for a couple of years ago. I swapped in a new 1 TB disk drive ($100), loaded up Ubuntu Linux (free) and installed the free, open source Banshee software. As a music server, Banshee does everything you want in terms of GUI presentation, search, plays all the file formats and even gets you Internet Radio.

Free. So for $250, I got something which does everything your Antipodes box does AND it has a screen too! Not long ago I started working with DSP, so I paid $50 for a JRiver license and have been working with their DSP plug-in. Even Antipodes doesn’t have DSP, does it?

Did you notice that you can buy it for $5000 without a disk drive, or pay $6500 for it to have 1 TB of storage. $7500 gets you 2.3TB! I got my 1TB of storage for $100.

Ultimately all these things do is to deliver a digital file for your DAC to read and process. There are no magic cables or connectors that make any difference whatsoever. None. That’s the beauty of digital data. Either it transfers or it doesn’t. That’s because all data is transferred with error correction protocols.

Y’all are streaming digital data from Tidal and such over thousands of miles, over at least a dozen routers, fibre to copper converters, over cable or DSL, and somehow you expect that digital information to be absolutely 100% correct, but when you’re at the last 10 feet suddenly you need to manage it with a $7500 PC running an experimental version of Linux?!

Clearly I’m in the wrong line of work if y’all are buying this stuff.

Lots of good ideas here.  I did something along the lines of what sbank did, and it's quite effective.

I used EAC to rip my entire CD collection to a Qnap NAS as FLAC and stream bit-perfect to my preamp using a Raspberry Pi and HiFiBerry (though there are other DAC boards) running Moode audio player, but Volumio is also highly recommended.  There are others as well, such as OSMC and OpenELEC running Kodi media center.

So, if you want an affordable solution, you could start with a Pi3, HiFiBerry and existing laptop just to experiment.  For about $100 bucks, you might be quite surprised at the results.

I've been building my own custom media PCs for over 20 years now.  I tend to agree with russbutton except I would also say that you do need to look at the internals of the PC.  Check out computer audiophile.com where there are a number of good hardware and software combos.  I love foobar as the front end.