Music server quality.

I bought a laptop that is dedicated as a music server. Its a mac. It never crashes. It's not wireless. As I said, I used the wireless squeezebox and found that the sound quality of the macs using the new intel chip and the digital output directly via toslink into a dac sounded clearly superior to the squeezbox into the same dac. Of course you want to have an internet connection so that i-tunes can get all of the data about the cds that you add to your library. But I honestly don't understand what it is that these other products offer. My laptop and 500 G hd cost about $1800 and that is literally all that you need if you already have a dac that you like. The mac has its own remote with a screen configuration that is visible from across the room or you can hook it up to a TV monitor. Don't want a laptop, buy a mini for $500! I'm not getting into the mac vs pc thing here for computing. This is just as a dedicated music server and nothing else. I think its cheaper, works better and sounds better easier to add more storage capacity etc.

I use an MBL 1511E DAC fed by a Mac Powerbook with the new intel chip. The new Macs don't have a fan but do have an optical digital out, so you can use a toslink cable to the DAC. I have a 500 Gb external hard disc. My 800 + CDs only use about half the space in lossless compression.

I just use i-tunes. The computer, hard drive and cable were under $2K. I was using a Sony XA 777 ES as a transport until I could purchase the MBL transport. But the server system sounds clearly superior to using the Sony and really has me wondering about the benefits of spending the money on the MBL transport.

I guess I just don't get the packaged server products. Are they for people who are afraid of computers?

What do they do that a simple Mac running i-tunes can't do, cheaper? That is, assuming that you want to use your own dac? I have a squeezebox, but it doesn't sound nearly as good as the mac going straight into the dac with the optical output. Am I missing something here?

Not sure if that is directed at me, Ckorody, but if it is, you completely miss my point. Its just a plastic box. It does this one thing very well and rather inexpensively. My original question is, why would you spend more, what do you get by spending more? I made this choice at the advice of Gordon Rankin at Wavelength (I'm just using a different DAC). It has absolutely nothing to do with the Mac/Microsoft nonsense.