Thanks, all - this is helpful. I'm at the beginning stages of figuring out my new system. I'll be posting a few other questions in the appropriate forums. Previously I had a simple setup with a desktop pushing music over optical cable directly to my AV receiver. Dead simple and works great. But the mobo fried after many years.
I wish there was a way do do the same thing but from my laptop on the couch. Airplay is the obvious answer, but most of my music is in FLAC format. I have lots of live tapes downloaded from BT.etree.org (live dead, etc) that isn't properly tagged, so it makes it hard to load into a program like iTunes or j river. Previously I've just had a pretty strong filing system in windows explorer to keep things organized without tags, and played music in winamp. Works fine for my needs. But being able to do it from the couch would be ideal!
Again, I need to organize my thoughts and questions and post to the appropriate forum...
