Sonore Streamers

[Hifi_swlon]

Wow, Guillaume, you (and maybe a few others) could always start a rival Audio review site if you had the inclination - you guys get through an impressive load of kit.

Im sure Melco know what they're doing but they seem to have overcomplicated things to my mind - they had an expensive and a cheaper model, Z and A, and it was pretty clear.  Now there's more models and its not clear to me what they're aimed at.  Im surprised they haven't tapped into this low-cost, simpler, smaller 'renderer' market  that seems to be exploding - i.e. take out everything except the ethernet, the USB, and whatever you need to get the data out as cleanly as if it was coming from internal drives.  Put it all in a  small box, and hey-presto!  But I guess thats higher volume sales maybe not what they're after.

I'm really hopeful from everything that I've read everywhere, () that the 'tiny' computer's the way to go - people seem to be saying they have amazing setups from a cubox running custom software, and a decent power supply, with the ethernet providing most of the isolation.  I can see the logic to this and Ive read some nice posts on how the final connection is really the only bit that matters (unless data is actually being lost/dropped somewhere), otherwise on streaming services, you'd have to worry about the jitter-trail all the way back to hard drives in their data-servers for example.

At the end of the day, all I really care about is its at least as good as my mac-mini (not a very high bar admittedly), and reliable.  But I have far higher hopes!