18-Sep-2014, 22:56
I assume that a lot of the people who are happy with their computers have simply never tried a NAS / UPnP streamer setup.
As for the ones who prefer JRiver to n-Stream or Kinsky, I confess that I am puzzled. How can this ongoing beta (on my iMac) full of bugs, crashing constantly and to my ears sounding worse than iTunes be compared to rock solid solutions like Kinsky or n-Stream? I might have an above average set-up with a managed Cisco switch doing the hard work or delivering the bits from my NAS (good cabling, link aggregation, jumbo frames etc) but I have never experienced as much as a glitch or a hiccup with any of the two platforms. Yes, I had to restart my NDS (but funny enough never my NDX) once. But jRiver is giving me headaches every time I try to use it. And converting my hundreds of FLAC albums to an iTunes friendly format is simply not acceptable.
As for HDMI I agree, it is another regrettable omission although I will concede that the home cinema business is going to see significant hardware / software changes in the near future (HDMI 2.0, 4K, Atmos etc) so not sure how future proof it would have been.
As for the ones who prefer JRiver to n-Stream or Kinsky, I confess that I am puzzled. How can this ongoing beta (on my iMac) full of bugs, crashing constantly and to my ears sounding worse than iTunes be compared to rock solid solutions like Kinsky or n-Stream? I might have an above average set-up with a managed Cisco switch doing the hard work or delivering the bits from my NAS (good cabling, link aggregation, jumbo frames etc) but I have never experienced as much as a glitch or a hiccup with any of the two platforms. Yes, I had to restart my NDS (but funny enough never my NDX) once. But jRiver is giving me headaches every time I try to use it. And converting my hundreds of FLAC albums to an iTunes friendly format is simply not acceptable.
As for HDMI I agree, it is another regrettable omission although I will concede that the home cinema business is going to see significant hardware / software changes in the near future (HDMI 2.0, 4K, Atmos etc) so not sure how future proof it would have been.