Jerschu81

Wondering the same. Swapping my dragonfly back and forth it seems to sound best out of the laptop direct. Hard to tell though. System not high end. My hardrive goes into the docking station via usb. Laptop runs jriver and I’ve always gone laptop usb direct to powered monitors via the external DAC. But I wanted to use a shorter cable today and started swapping from the dock to the laptop. Anyone with more knowledge have the logic to this?

Long shot here but I inherited a few of I assume is some sort of in-line isolation device and was hoping someone here could tell me exactly what I have from the photos.

Thanks Eloise. This may be simplifying things a bit but in order for the zones to be "seen" by JRMC it sounds like there are two options. Either the program recognizes available channels locally on the sound card/DAC or it finds zones on the network by way of DLNA?? I will likely be steering clear of multiple amps directly connected to the laptop and running speaker wire etc. But not ruling it out. But at this point if I just run Cat6 in my walls, I would stuck with something like Sonos or another DLNA type system? (Or a mix and match of DLNA equipment). Any other options with just running Cat6? Or do I have a basic understanding? Thanks again.

First, THANK YOU all who contribute your knowledge on this site. I've learned so much. My question revolves around a networked/whole house audio system I have only envisioned at this point. But recent home improvements had me open up several walls and with so much time invested in quietly ripping and organizing a 700G/24000 song library I want to take this time to get the future infrastructure correct. The plan is to use JRMC installed on a windows laptop for control and playback of the music files on a NAS of some sorts. Ideally I would like 4 zones not counting my existing studio monitors connected to the laptop. I have several questions that may come to light after answering my first main question. Can I just run CAT6 from the laptop running JRMC direct to the NAS and still get multizone audio from future wired CAT6? OR do I need to add a sound card capable of sending multi-channel out from the laptop to the NAS? And if it is the later, what would this connection be? As you can tell I'm a little confused how that aspect works.