Well that's tricky as I never got round to using an ID40 with the MC200. I was being deliberately vague as I'm not in a position to compare (unlike yourself). It's more the theory I was hinting at. There's not much special sauce here, it's about clocks/jitter and there's plenty people out there going down the same road. I would be interested to hear Linn servers.

I found an old mac mini sounded pretty good compared to an MC200. As I understand it, using an asynchronous USB reduces jitter, using an SSD reduces the noisy environment and the newer ones have low power consumption. The result is very good but I'm not in a position to compare. There is quite a bit of tinkering available here, running the pc in 64 bit kernel, using different operating systems, using different players. Upsampling and filters are available. Fiddling eats up listening time and you forget where you started but at least you get to play, which M don't let you do.

Cheers Tintin