So after a day and a half with the thing, I can report that it works, and works well, with one major and one minor caveat.

Last night I was able to listen to a mix of 44.1/16 and 48/24 AIFF and Apple Lossless on my iPad Mini from the Wireless Plus, at a distance of about 12 feet, with no dropouts at all.  I haven't yet tried to figure out what it's maximum usable range is, but I'll get to that.

Sound quality?  About what I expected.  I was able to compare a number of tracks that I had on both the Wireless Plus and the iPad, using UERMs plugged directly into the headphone jack of the iPad and also a Fostex HP-P1/Fostex TH 600 combo.  Transient response was a little less good from the wireless source.  There was less of a sense of "air" around voices and instruments.  The combination of those two issues was noticeable on the guitar harmonics at the beginning of "Nowhere Man," from the Bill Frisell album All We Are Saying, but on the same track Kenny Wolleson's drums had all the wallop they are supposed to have.  Instrumental timbres don't seem to be adversely affected. the first movement of the Minnesota Orchestra/Vanska recording of Beethoven Symphony No. 3 sounded just fine, thanks.

The iOS app is easy to understand and use, and doesn't seem to be adding any coloration or artifacts to the playback process.

Haven't really tested battery life yet, so I won't comment on that at this time.

Caveats?

(1) loading the thing is a tedious process.  After a fair amount of trial and error, the process that works best for me to upload tracks from an external drive connected by FireWire to my Mac to the Wireless Plus is (a) connect it to the WiFi network the computer is on, (b) wait for a drive called "public-01" to mount on the desktop, (c) double-click to open public-01, and (d) drag files to the open window.  That worked much better for me than connecting the drive to the computer via USB and dragging folders.

(2) if you're a Mac user who manages his or her music library using iTunes, you know that its handling of album art leaves a lot to be desired.  No different in this application.  Basically, if artwork is stored in the iTunes database (as opposed to be embedded in individual files), you're going to lose it when you copy the file to the Wireless Plus.

Bottom line: YMMV, but until we start to see 512 gig portable sources, I can live with this, and live pretty happily with it.

If Lossless files sound like they lack air due to going through wireless(transfer rate may be the bottleneck) then won't using aac 256 files be a better option for this? I mean its quite hard to discern the difference between AAC plus 256 and lossless so it may actually sound better than the lossless files when going through wireless due to the issue of transfer rate becoming less of a problem?

I take your point, but I'm not sure the Seagate app can handle AAC (I know it doesn't do FLAC), so if I were going to go that way, I would go to 320k mp3.

So, are you able to use iTunes/AirPlay or are you working outside in a new player/application?

So, are you able to use iTunes/AirPlay or are you working outside in a new player/application?

I'm using the Seagate Mobile app, which is a free download from the App Store. It pretty much mirrors the functionality of the iOS native Music app.

The AirPlay icon shows up, but the way my house is arranged I would have no reason to use it; our AppleTV is on the same wireless network as the computer in my office, so I have ready access to the entire 2.7Tb library if I want to stream music to the family room.

Quote from: wildstar on October 21, 2013, 09:09:01 AM

If I understood this correctly, AirPlay and DLNA require transcoding unless the data is already in a supported format (for an embedded device it's better to just transcode everything). So with this you're never listening to the original audio, it's always transcoded. Makes it useless for hi-fi use, in my opinion.

I'm pretty certain that's not correct. The way I'm using it is not invoking either AirPlay or DLNA. The transferred files are on the drive in the original format, whether that be AIFF or ALAC.  Millions of Mac/iTunes users have transcoded billions of FLAC files using a variety of software, and AFAIK there is no reliable evidence of degradation of sound quality attributable to transcoding.

You're welcome to your opinion, but I don't think it's well founded. The data and my ears both tell me something different.

Huh? They're not stored transcoded. They're transcoded on the fly on playback (streaming).
If they're not transcoded then they should by bit identical to a local copy on the device and thus cannot have "lack of air" in comparison, as it will be the exact same data.

Note that the term "transcoding" includes compression to a lossy format, it's not just "flac<->alac".

My guess is that the device streams everything at 44 kHz 16 bit PCM, since this is supported by both DNLA and AirPlay and is "CD quality".