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Best Digital Music Server

I am looking for opinions of the "best" digital music server considering the following:

1) CD ripping capability/available formats
2) User Interface - I am crazy from trying to ID "Unknown Albums", dropped first tracks, missing album art, etc. on my PC.
3) HiRes (is Sony's technology -as an example - audibly different?) capability.
4) Streaming flexibility - not a big part of my listening experience, but getting bigger all the time it seems.
5) Last but not least - SOUND QUALITY.  I have a reasonably nice DAC (DA2) built into my McIntosh MC2700 PreAmp, so would prefer a '"no internal DAC" solution, but open to it if all the other rankings say buy it anyway.

Thank you in advance for your opinions!

Mark
mhwilliford

Showing 2 responses by soix

soix
8,592 posts
 
What’s your budget?
soix
8,592 posts
 
For me, life’s too short to try to cobble together various hardware and software bits hoping to God it somehow works in the end, which we all know it won’t and then will require even more painful and time-consuming troubleshooting.  Some people love wallowing around in that stuff for days on end.  Not me.  I’m dumb and perfectly willing to admit my shortcomings.  So if someone like Innuos will do all that crap work for me and put it in a box for 2600 bucks, call it the Zen Mk3, offer great customer support just in case, and have me up and running successfully and painlessly in a matter of minutes I’m happily (and completely ignorantly) all in.  But again, that’s me.  Best of luck. 
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