In the interest of full disclosure, I am a MSB dealer, and made this decision in a large part due to the release of the iLink. The iPod as a transport is an extremely capable device.
Since you did choose to be a dealer; out of curiosity, Ron, what do you think the selling point is of a $2k investment in hooking up an iPod to one's main rig via a DAC? Per my post, for that price you can buy a laptop, an 500gb external drive, and a modest USB-SPDIF converter and have your entire music library at your fingertips, not just 80gb of it. If you own an iPod it is pretty likely you already have a computer of some sort with your music library ripped to a hard drive, so you could probably invest less. The iPod is essentially a miniature hard drive. According to Toshiba, the manufacturer of the drive, the MTBF for the mini hard drive in an iPod is rated at 20,000 hours. Given the typical use/abuse of an iPod as a mobile music provider I'd guess that number is optimistic in many cases. I'd consider this to be a further argument against investing that much into a devise with a rather limited lifespan. Compared to a typical laptop where the MTBF is up in hundreds of thousands of hours, and has far more versatile applications. I'm sure the iPod is a very capable device via the MSB interface at streaming digital. It would be a great technology offering if it came down to the price of a standard iPod docking station, or was an integral offering on a stock iPod (even then, it would still be a novelty device in my view - if I'm playing my main rig via a DAC I'd rather have all my music available to me rather than just 60GB, in my case)--But $2,000?! What justifies that kind of investment in a $400 iPod? I don't doubt that implementing the technology involved to a current stock iPod takes a significant amount of time, effort and expertise, so I'm not questioning the price from that standpoint...just wonder who's buying those things and why?
Marco
