Chris1971,

The Escient systems are good for a lot of people, including housewives. It is great for people who visit a local installer and have a system installed and never want to deal with it ever again. If they happen to reach a limit or have a problem they call their installer and it is fixed/upgraded and an invoice is received in the mail.

I just think that most people who spend time on high-end audio forums and are interested in the details will want a PC/Mac audio server. Most people that have Escient systems are people who don`t care much about the difference between MP3`s and lossless. There is nothing wrong with them, they are just busy in other parts of there life right now and they want a slick and simple way to store/play their music. They may not have a PC, or only use one occasionally. They are successful and want a quality product but are not aficionados.

For most tech savvy people who already have a PC and would still have a PC to maintain even if they bought an Escient system, they will get tired of the maintaining two systems. At least that is what happened to me. For users that want to spend time with play lists and share files across devices, having a separate system dedicated to serving up music seems to add complexity.

There was a time when I thought that stand alone music servers would become very popular with all households and replace CD players. Now I am inclined to think that a PC/Mac that does it all will be more common in the future and the stand alone CD players / music server will become a niche market.

That said, there were predictions that with Windows XP Media Edition, sales of PC based media centers would explode. That has not happened and only time will tell.