A couple years ago, I found out about the Roku Soundbridge and snagged one. I wasn't looking for a way to serve my own music, but for a way to listen to Internet radio through the "real" stereo without having to connect a computer. I loved it so much that I bought another one just for the bedroom.
After a while, I decided to try running its server software to play back some of my live music downloads, most of which were (and still are) FLAC. I wasn't so impressed...sound quality was OK, but the lack of true gapless playback really annoyed me. It also bothered me that the forced resampling to 48k destroyed DTS. Still, I loved the little boxes for the radio capability and still think that they're a good deal if that's your primary focus. After a while I heard about the Squeezebox and, when a friend asked what he should get, I told him that I liked the Roku well enough, but that it looked like the Squeezebox was better. So he bought one and began raving about it, which in turn got me to give in and buy one...and then another. I gave away one of the Rokus and still use the other in another room. The downside to the Squeezebox is that I suddenly got obsessed with getting all of my live, rare stuff (CD-DA, FLAC, SHN) onto a server. So I had to spend big bucks for a NAS and am still working on getting all the music onto it. I'm also loading up a few "normal" (i.e., official/mainstream) CDs, but my collection has got to be in the 2,500 range, so I'm definitely not making the same effort to convert everything. I love that I can listen to downloads without all the annoyance and unpleasant additional sounds or interrutions that can happen when trying to listen through the computer. I also appreciate that SqueezeCenter runs nicely on a cheap Ubuntu box, so I can have my Windows machine do all its normal Windowsy stupidity without interrrupting the music. -- atrocity ------------------------------------------------------------------------ atrocity's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16009 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53831 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
