I remember being able to go to index marks on my lumpy gravy CD on my parents CD changer.
Phisycal media is good, however it's heavy, and if you're one that moves frequently like me, the NAS storage option is a real backbone saver.
I've found nothing that will adequately playback 5.1 flac gaplessly. The only thing adequate, is a computer.
The oppo....not gapless.
Oppo only cares about discs, which are so 2000s. While the oppo is a necessity for having something that will play any disc you can throw at it, between the lack of gapless playback, and trying to rob us of .iso playback after establishing it as a feature, I really don't think too highly of the guys over at oppo.
The netgear box came close. So close. It is the only thing that did everything I wanted, easy navigation of my folder structure to allow me complete organizational control, gapless playback of flac.....but, while it is the only box that does it all exactly as I want it to, it is the most unstable piece of shit.
So I picked up a pioneer. Absolutely a nightmare to navigate.
using foobar as a server software resulted in surround material not playing in surround. Not sure if it's a foobar setting, or the pioneer doesn't support streaming surround.
So, I've upgraded my home theater computer to have an hdmi video card, which also works for sound and supports surround. I don't know why I got so hung up on home theater network playback without a computer
There are also cool devices out there that could probably be made to do something, like raspberry pi, I suspect one could probably program one of those things into a network flac player.
raspberry pi works as well (if not better than a squeezebox...but I haven't tried 5.1 on it...but it like squeezebox needs a computer to start with...)
The OPPO 103 and 105 do a fine job of FLAC 4.0 and 5.1 playback across the network at a affordable price.
Not gaplessly.
I believe a Raspberry Pi can also function as a server, so you wouldn't need a separate computer.
Having said that, it's not particularly powerful and apparently doesn't transcode well. The price is certainly right, but I'd strongly recommend that anyone just starting out go with a Wandboard instead. It can also be used both as server and player, though the price is higher than a Raspberry Pi.
In my setup, all the music is on self-contained NASes that hook into the network rather than to any specific computer. This makes it very easy to add music using the generally more robust Windows tools for extraction while sending it to the players via the more robust Ubuntu or Fedora (on the Wandboard) servers.
I'd also like to point out that this is almost sort of slightly on-topic as the devices we're talking about work nicely with DTS (including DTS 96/24) and AC-3 in a FLAC wrapper. Someone has even figured out how to wrap stereo DSD in a FLAC file, though I personally have zero experience with that.
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