HT Talk

wstar

It's really not the same There's a million ways to play digital audio, I guess, but the Slim Devices stuff puts a lot of focus on good codec support in the hardware and high quality DACs and outputs. It's audiophile-grade stuff dedicated to the task of reproducing sound, rather than "hey we have audio out, let's tack on mp3 playing support onto our game console". I suppose if you actually are playing low-quality mp3s there might not be much difference anyways (as mp3 loses so much quality right off the bat), but for a FLAC (or other lossless codec) digital collection it matters.

There are only a few true competitors in this segment, the most notable being Olive and Sonos.

Regardless of what you use for the audio out part in the living room, one thing that's really nice to do for any of them is to move your digital audio library to a dedicated little NAS server, so that your PC can be shut off (or busy playing games or whatever). Stuff like the ReadyNAS (or any of its million competitors) is cheap and works well for that sort of thing.

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