I have been interested in the idea of a Sound Server for a couple years now. I started with a turtle beach device that hooked up to my network and streamed audio out a digital coax. The specs were great, it did what was advertised but it did not work in an everyday setting. The interface was very slow; it slowed down network traffic so that while playing music you really noticed the delay and the web interface was very slow.

I then bought an IMerge S1000 for ~$2,000. This could store .WAV files and solved the network traffic problem. I did not like the interface again and I quickly filled the 80G drive. This solution might have been workable if all of my CD`s would fit on in the unit. This unit did not support lossless compression. I then bought the IMerge S2000. This had 160G but was so loud that I sent it back to the manufacturer. They said that the load humming was normal. I guess it has two disk drives and a fan. If I had the music turned up load enough I could not hear the humming. But I would always turn the unit off when not in use so that I would not be distracted by the load humming. Then I would have to boot the unit up every time I wanted to listen to music. I gave up and sold it.

I am now interested in a Window XP Media Center PC. Gateway has a unit that looks like an audio component (I don`t like the color). I am interested in buying one of these and adding or changing the audio card to support the three digital outs that are needed for the G68 to support DVD-A surround. That way I could use this device and watch DVD`s using the DVI out, I would get a digital signal directly off the disk and out the DVI that would be the same as any other player. For movies the current digital out would just pass the Dolby or DTS signal to the G68. If I could get a better sound card that would pass 5.1 channel 48k/24bit audio to the G68 using 3 digital coax outputs the job would be finished. I would get the same picture as a G91 (DVI) and the same sound bits. I would also get a Sound Server that is hooked up to the internet for streaming audio.

I will add that I am a firm believer that as long as we have non-defective devices that one digital signal is the same as another. I don`t want to start a separate discussion, but that is my belief until otherwise shown.