PC for Multichannel Music Playback - What's your Setup?

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Here is what I see when I right click on the "skin" file...

3-13-2015 1.jpg
 
Should be in your downloads folder c:\users\gene\downloads

You need to select & extract the instructions also.
 
OK, so it installed...then it opened a PDF program....but the only thing that it showed me was the album information for THEO!! What the hell.....I assume I don't need to save that....
 
I've ordered their top of the line one for $139...now I just need to wait for the shipping from Israel!

The CuBox-i4 Pro arrived from Israel yesterday and I hooked it up right away.

I didn't get to spend as much time with it as I'd have liked, but preliminary results are very promising.

The first two tracks of "The Endless River" played back fine in 5.1 24/96 with no weirdness at all around the track breaks. The quad "The Dark Side of the Moon" was good and gapless between "Speak to Me" and "Breathe".

Then I played "In the Court of the Crimson King" all the way through...well, I tried to. A couple minutes before the end it bailed, but I was dinking around with the XBMC/Kodi iPad controller app at the time and strongly suspect that whatever happened was my fault.

Assuming it really does work out, it's a pretty amazing little box. It's just a cube, 2 INCHES on each side and cost me a total of $151 including shipping. I'm feeding the music to it via NFS from a USB drive connected to a Linux computer. Attempting to feed it via SMB resulted in an error along the lines of "connection refused", which makes zero sense. Since I had the NFS option, I haven't tried to figure that out yet.

Although it would be nice if it also plays my backed up HD-DVD rips, I haven't done any experimenting with video at all yet. Well, that's not 100% true--out of curiosity I tried to get it to serve video to my iPad while the music was playing, but that killed the music almost immediately. If it can't play and serve at the same time, I'm not going to worry about it.

My experience so far:

1. Windows computer using Foobar2000: Works great if the music is stored locally, is horrible if trying to play from the network. HDMI goes silent unless a monitor is connected and turned on. Expensive computer.

2. Acer Aspire Revo nettop running XBMC/Kodi under Ubuntu Linux: Channel assignments were completely screwed up and I was never able to correct them. Computer is now my file server.

3. Raspberry Pi B: Useless.

4. Raspberry Pi 2: Useless.

5. CuBox-i4 Pro: Looking good, will test more.
 
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