Mac AIR v MiND 180 v Auralic ARIES v totaldac d1 server

[Eddye]

So, sorry to be a pain in the a***, but if one has a source, be it a laptop (with screen and cd ripper and data) or a CD player/transport (with discs), both of which will plug straight into the Devialet, what does the D1 do (aside from any sound quality considerations) that the straight connections cannot achieve? Because here you surely need four units - source, cd ripper, tablet and D1?

All my music is stored on a QNAP NAS. In order to access it I need a device to pull from it and send to my Devialet... why is that? Because the Devialet doesn't support UPnP and has its own proprietary streaming solution: AIR which relies on running a Mac or a PC to stream your music. I would rather not use my laptop to play my music - at the moment my Macbook Air sits in my study connected to a large screen and with an external keyboard and is used for a wide range of activities including work and running this forum! .

Whereas my NAS is always on and does its stuff in the background including RAID 5 backups. If one of the drives fails (which has already happened once)... no problems I just replace it and don't lose any data. It's the same NAS that also supplies music data to my living room (via a Linn Majik DSI) and bathroom. It's the "heart" of my music network.

It's way off-topic and I'm sure you know this, but I thought to mention this anyway. RAID is not a backup. If you value your digital music collection and other important data (like photo's and such) also back up to an external harddrive (and to be doubly sure another one as off-site backup)