www.boxertrix.com

Hi, any of you guys into music streaming of hi res (mainly flac) 2 ch audio?
Have been involved in hifi for years and am well up to sorting through the bullshit given by salesmen on that side of it but am a streaming newbie.

Am currently using an old laptop on Windows 7 outputting via Jriver through USB to an external DAC, FLAC files stored on a simple NAS server connected via ethernet.

Would like to ditch the laptop and get rid of Windows as it is a bit like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, don't want to go down the Mac route so is Linux the best option? If so, anybody got any suggestions that don't cost the earth please?

There are a few things advertised, but most have in-built DACs, which are superfluous for me.

Raspberry Pi running some kind of Linux would be the best option, I'd have thought.

Have a dig around here:

http://www.raspbmc.com

Many thanks for that, should have mentioned, but have actually tried the Pi with a program called Raspyfi and had problems with drop-outs on anything above 16bit 44.1k files due to a problem inherent to the Pi sharing the same bus (or something) for ethernet and USB. There is talk about a future fix for it though.

How long ago did you try the Pi?

The current Model B is twice the memory of early models, which I believe fixes a lot of the issues early machines had.

Pi was recent, it is the new version, but thanks to your prompt I have looked into it a bit more and may give it another try.
Otherwise there is a more advanced option apparently with Udoo

I have two Blackberry Playbooks, one of which is dedicated to being a music hub.

I can stream over wifi to it from most of the places I need, ie web and NAS and being 64gb have a few cd's ripped onto it.

It connects to my hifi via a Blackberry Music Gateway which is a bluetooth device specifically designed for the job.

The Playbook was on offer, new, at £99 and the music gateway was £15 I think, oh and I got a docking station so it "sits" neater and is permanently charged, that was a couple of quid on offer too.

As a plus, with having a Blackberry phone too means my phone can act as a remote control for the Playbook

Just caught up with this thread.
I have a similar Win7 setup using a redundant desktop. This archives my photos, music and movies which are then backed up to separate portable drives.
I use a Pi running the latest version of RaspBMC to stream video and music to my TV and surround sound.
Because of the buffering issues streaming large video files ( >2Gb MKV files)
I switched from wireless to ethernet using a 200Mbs powerline and make sure all video files are encoded 1080P MP4
I never had issues streaming music wirelessly although my collection is all MP3.
I also use Plex to stream video and music to my Ipad

Hi Mike, thanks for that, it may be worth me trying Raspbmc rather than Raspyfi, (which has now become Volumio).
Tried a couple of different software settings but still have some drop-outs on 24/96k files.
Apparently there is a way of getting the digital audio out of the HDMI socket, but how is beyond me at present!
Am also investigating using a Cubox, which has more processing power.
Bring back vinyl!