What is the function/pupose of music plyr/streamer

i just posted with many of the same questions regarding my recently-acquired squeezebox touch and learned the following:
1. my squeezebox does play flac (apple lossless files), which a number of other media players won't; if the device doen't state that it supports a particular format i would not assume that it does;
2. if you're using the media player in the same room as your computer, it is somewhat redundant--i.e. the computer can perform the same functions of managing and playing files, etc. as noted above, the media player may have a better dac than the internal dac of the computer and thus sound better, tho if you're using a separate external dac this advantage is negated. the key advantage of the media player would be the ability to stream files from your computer in one room to another room (or, if you're not using a computer to play files off a iusb drive or sd card assuming that your media player has this ability).

There are two basic types of digital computer music streaming: 1) USB or Firewire driven and 2) network driven

If you are using USB or Firewire, it uses some or all of the audio stack S/W in the computer. Therefore, improvements in sound quality can be achieved by using Amarra, Jriver or Pure Music player software to avoid some of the audio stack nasties. Once these are avoided, the audio quality can be the best available, as supporting hi-res.

If you are using wired or wireless networked via Squeezebox Touch, then the data is the data and the audio stack is not involved. Player software is custom for each device, such as Sonos or Touch (Squeezecenter) or AppleTV (iTunes). Most of these do not support hi-res or are limited to 24/96.

Apple creates kind of a hybrid of networking and core audio, so its not a good thing. Their airplay sends the file WiFi only from core audio and encodes it as apple lossless. Not good. its not just "data".

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

The music player/streamer, like say Squeezebox Touch, is a specialized computer designed specifically for streaming audio.

As such it is a special kind of digital audio source component designed to deliver good audio performance that can also be easly both physically and electronically isolated from the computer data source. That's usually a good insurance policy for a good sounding audio system because a general purpose computer is not generally designed to be used as an audio component in an audio system and may often prove to be a source of unwanted noise and distortion best kept isolated from a well performing audio system.

It gets it's data using a normal network data connection (wired or wireless) to your computer and then connects like other audio sources to your audio system. If you use the built in DAC the connection to the audio system is analog. Or You can use the digital output to an external DAC which then connects to the audio system. The DAC used will largely determine the resulting sound.

Is the Squeezebox Touch 24/96 limit confined to the internal DAC (so that a 24/192 DAC could take the Touch signal at 24/192) or is it a limit on the ability to stream?

My understanding is 24/96 is the devices inherent streaming limit, but I could be wrong.

That's pretty good for the <$300 cost these days.