Meitner MA3i DAC Review

PSAudio (I think) had a network player which copied the entire song into memory before playing it. 

@habaneromonk I pulled the cable from my Aurender N200 once as an experiment (I no longer have this streamer) after I kicked off a pretty long playlist. It played all the way thru. Yes you lose controller options as it’s no longer connected to network but the 256gb was cool. 
To me local playback means music files stored within your local network. Buffer is a temporary storage. Not really local. But if you want to call it that I’m not gonna stop you. 

@audphile1 To me local playback means music files stored within your local network. Buffer is a temporary storage. Not really local. But if you want to call it that I’m not gonna stop you. 

Understood but it doesn't change the fact one iota that no matter what you are indeed playing 'on premise'. 

SSD, HDD, RAM. Somewhere there is your music. It's 100% local. It's a copy. Your Aurender had enough to copy the entire playlist, my streamer has enough to copy 30 seconds at a time.

My computer has enough for a full CD worth and it can do it in about 1.5 seconds. Just because it's RAM buffer set aside doesn't mean it's not local. 

@habaneromonk I see that it is of great importance to you. I will agree with you that the 30sec buffer is local to you. To me it’s no more local than a fart that sometimes exceeds the lifespan of your streamer’s buffer. But that’s a whole other topic for another day. 

Still trying to figure out the impact of the Ethernet cable when your Aurender N200 has copied over the entire playlist.

It's interesting in the Data Center and Hyper Converged Infrastructure space that at rest storage is on it's own stack a lot of times and we provision block storage over TCP/IP or ROCEv2. 

Currently building out a lab proxmox cluster for our work and using CEPH. So 5 nodes, 192GB RAM per node, 80Gbps (lacp QSFP+) storage plane. 44C/88T per, with all flash NVME. SFP28 X 96 on the data plane. 

So the entirety of the block storage gets distributed across the 5 nodes. So the 80Gbps is the storage bus. It's been a fun project.