I've been thinking about building a dedicated arm based music machine. Using archphile or one of the other Linux distos. How do you think the Intel celeron boards compare to the arm boards like the RPi 2 Dave? What would be the reason to get the full Intel board?

Edit: I guess you would say it is so you can use dedicated USB cards with that Intel board, which you can't do with the arm ones.

Yeah I want that PCI-E slot. Otherwise a NUC board or Pi would do the same job in a smaller space. You could always skip the card and use an Uptone Regen or something, but I think the card still provides the best results. The Celeron N board can also support multiple drives if you want something a little more fully featured, like direct CD ripping, or multiple hard drives.

It would be awesome if people could get audio out of their PC's without USB...

USB is better.

So going back to the "files being read directly from DAC" point... would a memory card reader in a DAC be easier to implement/do a better job than going through USB? The DAC could still be "controlled" through USB, but I wonder if jitter could be eliminated this way? It doesn't seem very popular, so I'm guessing it's hard to properly implement? Just wondering.

USB is better.

(click to show/hide)

Because?

You're telling me PCI > USB > DAC makes more sense than PCI > AES/SPDIF > DAC ?

It would be awesome if people could get audio out of their PC's without USB...

I predict it's all going to be bluetooth soon...