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.