gregc

Sure, I've used an inexpensive netbook (Eee PC 1000A running linux) as a music server without any problems at all. Since the sound cards in them are not that great, use an external DAC with a USB input.

The $500power cable has always seemed to me to represent the worst of the audiophile business (snakeoil) and I think you can go a long way toward showing it simply using logic. There is little need for any physical measurements or listening (heresy!).<br /> <br /> <br /> Normally audio equipment is connected to a plug in the wall that uses ordinary copper contacts. The plug is connected to say 50 feet of rather inexpensive 12 gauge 3 conductor cable (no oxygen free long crystals in sight!). Let's call it romex for short recognizing that Romex is really a brandname of wire. <br /> <br /> Logically, what can the $500 power cable do for us:<br /> <br /> Case 1 - it is completely neutral and neither adds nor subtracts from the input signal. At first this sounds pretty good, but if this is the case we can easiy save our $500 simply by shortening the length of our 50 feet of romex by a few feet since "completely neutral" is logically equivalent to "not there".<br /> <br /> <br /> Case 2 - it adds something bad to the signal, i.e some form of distortion. This is probably true since any piece of wire will interact with magnetic and electrical fields but if this effect is significantly greater that the equivalent length of cheap 12 gauge wire we have now made things worse! Save the $500 dollars and use more romex. <br /> <br /> <br /> Case 3 - it removes something we don't want from the signal and leaves what we do want unchanged. This is description of a filter and electrical filtering is a well understood phenomenon that requires either inductance and/or capacitance. The levels of inductance and capacitance of a few feet of wire are insufficient to act an effective filter but, for the sake of argument, let's say that they do. This is pretty easy to measure (yes, here I am resorting to a bit of measurement). Do you know of any $500 power cable makers that provide this data? <br />

>> Technical data will only tell you so much. While this might be true in the analogue world, it's just not the case with digital computers. They are deterministic machines and an adequate understanding of the hardware and the code running on the machine is completely sufficient to describe the output exactly. A disk drive delivers a stream of bits at a certain rate. Many USB flash drives are rather slow and cannot supply data at the rate necessary for high resolution audio or video. Here is an interesting comparison of some different brands: http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/review/usb-flash-memory/usb-flash-drive-comparison-21-tested-and-compared/ Changing the file system block size does make sense because we know that we are retrieving audio data and the files are quite large compared to the typical mix of data, but it's a relatively small optimization in the big picture.

If your interested in this I'd suggest you learn about - - USB Flash memory vs hard drive read/write performance - File system types and performance (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, HFS, XFS etc.) - File system block sizes: performance vs space utilization - Data throughput requirements for high resolution audio

I've just finished setting up an eeePC as a music server. This was my first experience with computer audio so I'm sure I'll be making improvements but I'm happy with it as a first attempt. The basic steps were: - I used EAC to rip my CDs to flac format and put them on an external USB disk drive. - Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an older eeePC. - Installed the MPD (music player demon) server software using the Ubuntu package manager. - Connected the netbook to an external USB DAC (Musical Fidelity V-DAC) - There are a number of MPD client programs but I have found the MPoD iPhone client to be incredibly convenient. On the plus side, the eeePC is small, generates relatively little heat and is pretty quiet. So far there seems to be sufficient cpu power to do the job, although I wouldn't run anything else on the system at the same time. I'm curious to see how it holds up running 24/7 and I'm still evaluating the overall sound.