Goodbye Sonos, hello ????

Jaxwired, thanks for the headsup on the Xonor. My problem is that the CAPS I am going to build (v3 Carbon) only has 1 available pcie slot which I was intending to use for a wireless card because unlike you my media is stored on a NAS so that my other Sonos devices and HTPCs can access the music and movie files. I could use a USB based wireless dongle. Hmmm...just need to make sure the SPDIF output is great quality.

Check out the coming Olive ONE. I think it'll hit all your points.

I agree with williewonka. I go Mac mini (out via usb) to Berkeley USB SPDIF converter (out via AES-EBU) to Berkeley DAC to preamp. I use iTunes with Audiovarna on the mini. Very very good.

I use a MacBook Air and Audirvana Plus via a MF V-Link then Toslink to a Krell HTS 7.1 for D/A decoding. The results, to me ears, playing HD FLAC files are nothing short of amazing. See my previous post on this subject:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ddgtl&1364947210&openmine&zzMgattmch&4&5#Mgattmch

I can also use the MacBook Air to stream directly, via iTunes, to an AirPort express for slightly lower quality audio anywhere in the home.

Forgot to clarify - when using Audirvana without iTunes integration it plays flac files from anywhere - even NAS drives - it's only when you integrate it with iTunes that it creates the proxy files and needs them both on the computer

I think Damien may be looking at this issue.

In "stand-alone mode" (i.e. without itunes) you can create multiple playlists of your music and recall them - from there you can filter the content of the playlist to refine a search.

The nice thing with itunes is that artist, album and genre categories are created automatically
- you can the create new genre's
- e.g. I listen to a lot of classical - itunes assigns this genre to a cd when loaded or a track when downloaded
- I then change the genre for a track or album
- e.g. I assign a genre of "Classical Woodwind" to woodwind tracks

Another nice thing about itunes is that it allows you to select multiple tracks to assign a genre to - even across albums - but this freedom can lead to icorrect assignment, so be careful.

I am not an Apple/iTunes bigot - quite the opposite - I just moved all my major apps back to a windows platform after a trying an iMac, which failed me miserably, but I will concede that even with it's warts - iTunes has one of the best interfaces out there for flexibility - even the Windows version performs very well and links to my iMac/iTunes and since installing Audirvana the playback is very impressive

Winamp - i tried it early on - is the closest I've seen to iTunes in flexibility, but I don't know about it's audio performance

Audirvana (native mode) would take a lot of effort to get the flexibility of iTunes - but it could be done

Windows Media Player - I gave up on after trying to import cd's - it's just not intuitive to me

Amarra seems to have a solid following and quite a nice interface - but the cost is too high and I think Audirvana has better quality playback - but if you want to taylor the sound it is probably the most flexible in that regard.

I guess now I have discovered the iTunes/iMac warts and overcome them I will stick with it - but if something else comes along I might be persuaded to change .

my requirement was to get the audio file data to my dac without upsampling - Audirvana does that extremely well

I have tried USB and Optical outputs and they sound identical - I think [this is due to the DH Labs cables, which I have found to perform the best - even better than Van den Hul - my next prefference.

hope this helps