I have had a number of music servers and I think they are great. After spending too much time and money on two versions of the Imerge dedicated servers I went the PC route. I spent $600 on a fancy RME sound card and had nothing but problems. It could play music fine but endless problems with audio portion while watching a video. I now have a system with an M-Audio sound card, RAID drives, dual AMD 254 CPU`s a 30” 2560x1600 monitor and a 70” TV. The audio goes though a G68, DSP8000`s front, DSP7000`s rear with a 5500 center.

I use a digital coax from the PC to the G68.

I would not say the system is trouble free. It seems that I have to update the firmware on the G68 too often. In my opinion Windows XP is not really designed for trouble free hi-fi audio. Many things seem more complicated than they should be. Many people have trouble getting DTS to work for example. And then when you get it working and you install some utility to rip DVD`s or convert them it messes up your audio.

Music servers are great and we can only hope that with a copy of 64bit Microsoft Vista all of the problems will go away. Hopefully someday soon they will become so easy to manage that my mom could set one up. I completely agree that music servers can/should sound the same as high dollar transports. There is the caveat that the getting the software/drivers setup so they sound “exactly” the same is more difficult than it should be. The biggest issue for most people is the re-sampling that the OS wants to do. It wants to blend all of the sounds from all of the application together. If you get past the OS re-sampling they should sound exactly the same.