Music server quality.

I bought a laptop that is dedicated as a music server. Its a mac. It never crashes. It's not wireless. As I said, I used the wireless squeezebox and found that the sound quality of the macs using the new intel chip and the digital output directly via toslink into a dac sounded clearly superior to the squeezbox into the same dac. Of course you want to have an internet connection so that i-tunes can get all of the data about the cds that you add to your library. But I honestly don't understand what it is that these other products offer. My laptop and 500 G hd cost about $1800 and that is literally all that you need if you already have a dac that you like. The mac has its own remote with a screen configuration that is visible from across the room or you can hook it up to a TV monitor. Don't want a laptop, buy a mini for $500! I'm not getting into the mac vs pc thing here for computing. This is just as a dedicated music server and nothing else. I think its cheaper, works better and sounds better easier to add more storage capacity etc.

the tribe has spoken

amen

Not sure if that is directed at me, Ckorody, but if it is, you completely miss my point. Its just a plastic box. It does this one thing very well and rather inexpensively. My original question is, why would you spend more, what do you get by spending more? I made this choice at the advice of Gordon Rankin at Wavelength (I'm just using a different DAC). It has absolutely nothing to do with the Mac/Microsoft nonsense.

I cannot really judge on quality of sound on squeeze box vs a mac (given I have tried neither)as u said but I wonder whether it may have to do more with wire vs wireless...but in any case u make valid pts which I was not aware of such as having remote for mac....never knew. However in terms of user interface....not sure how the mac remotes works etc...but I do have Sonus and its the best remote I have ever used on any consumer elec product bar none: the flexibility, visibility, funtionality, everything is absolutely genius: Squeeze box falters by a huge margin on this. Sound quality of Sonus feeding into my external DAC vs playing CDs...well my digital CD front end is top tier to say the least so benchmark is very high: the Sonus enjoyable but can't match my Meitner set up: but I bet its just as good as a average (?) CD player set up.

The MSB Tech IPOD solution also sounds interesting as the IPOD becomes a defacto remote: and MSB at least in the past via its DACs and CD players has done very well with digital auido so I find it very interesting: will be checking it out soon. Will check out the mac solutions you have pted as well.

I almost decided to invest the money for a stand-alone music server then I realized that the stand-alone music servers are dead ends, because if I am to 'enter' all my hundreds and hundreds of CDs into the proprietary server without back-up capability, I definitely will need to do backups - these servers do not have backup ability.