yay101

I am MUCH more optimistic about MQA having read through this thread and wish the team all the best, even if the results are just better masters for traditional PCM content which IMO makes more difference than any encoding ever made. HOWEVER the grey skies for me personally are the clouds around what will happen with decoding in the open source domain. If i can't at least add a decoder to my own audio solutions via a plugin with server key and lookup on install, even if licenced on a per user basis, I wont be buying MQA certified tracks and certainly wont be buying MQA certified hardware. That said i am sure i am the minority.

You could also get a raspberry pi and hifiberry digital output or the dac with a clean psu to do the same job as well. Another plus you can hide it away and never look at it again.

Something silent and arm based running a Linux of some kind like volumio. Remote apps for all platforms, a web interface as well, upnp and airplay. DSD playback. Bitperfect. Access media from local drives or nas. Cheap.

Its entirely not true. With hardware decoding a pi can do 1080p easily.

Not with the pi, no. But the number of arm based mini computers is mind boggling and some of them can handle 4-8 usb hdd's being used to send data over gigabit interfaces comfortsbly, even transcoded if needed. As I said before though, I wouldn't put money on a pi2 either way. It may surprise both of us and be perfectly fine with the task at hand.

Serving and playback, the pi will have no issue with any of that. It WILL fall down if you ask too much of the usb/ network connectors as a nas though. Especially since loading a file over USB + sending via network (also uses the USB bandwidth) will use one bus. That said, it depends on bitrates. 1080p + flac shouldn't saturate the bus even simultaniously. If you expect at most 1 1080 stream at anytime it would do fine, though.

I completely agree with all of these sentiments on this very complex question which is really about streaming rather than any one service. My major issue with tidal is the lack of hiphop and back catalogues, complete absence of Australian artists etc etc etc. Then you have the lack of public api so we can have native playback on the devices people who prefer flac are likely to use. Sonos? Really? Get your shit together Tidal. Or someone else offer me flac downloads at competitive prices. Bandwidth isn't as expensive as it once was guys.

For that sort of money you could get a pair of pioneer BS22LR and a T(D) class amp that from all accounts should sound a lot better. Hell even the audioengine A2 would probably make you a bit happier. But again, the sort of money is important.

Just use Linux. Run the entire OS and all your music from ram. From the comments in this thread so far from what i shall call "the believers" that would result in the holy land, anything else is just playing with yourself.

Yes i know, its to clean up the signal from the pi for whatever DAC the user provides therefore matching the quality of any other device one might choose.

Why not raspberry pi/ equivalent? The Aries is just "one more computer" as it is. Something like the schiit wyrd and you have yourself a very nice little remote player for a lot less.