Audio servers are becoming quite common today and are replacing traditional sources such as cd audio players. Several commercial products are available from Naim, Bryston, Olive, and lately also more consumer oriented producers such as Pioneer. Most of the solutions are however quite expensive starting from about € 500 for the very competitive Pioneer solution up to several thousands of euro for more esoteric solutions.
In fact I already had the idea of building such kind of device years ago and the original plan was of building a dedicate pc with a mini-itx fanless motherboard on a hifi like case. The PC had to be completely silent apart from the hard drive which would have been used to store the OS (probably linux or windows with J River media player) and the flac files. However the costs of realizing such project stopped me for a long time until a changed my original plan to something even more minimalistic when I knew about PC Engines and ALIX boards. This board is used as a base also on a high-end audio server such as the Bryston.
My super minimalistic approach is now based on the following components:
The Iomega NAS is wired to the router and serves FLAC files on a cifs share. Both of them are located in a different place from the listening room in order to avoid hearing the hard drive noise during listening sessions. The HRT Music Streamer is a minimalistic USB dac which is connected to a USB port on the Alix board on one side and to the analog inputs of an old Yamaha stereo amplifier a D class amp on the other side. The Alix board runs Music player daemon on top of voyage-mpd linux distribution (loaded from a CF card) which can be controlled from a variety of clients running on laptops, netbooks, cell phones. My favourite clients are ncmpc, which is installed by default on voyage mpd and can be accessed by ssh (for example with putty from a Windows machine), ncmpcpp (similar to ncmpc; can be installed on voyage with apt-get install ncmpcpp) on desktop machines, MpDroid on android phones and tablets.
The whole system costs just a little bit over 400 euro including a NAS to store the flac files and the router 3G which I also use to access the internet. The cheapest of the other systems is € 500 without NAS and router. The audio quality is at least comparable to an entry level (sub € 1000) CD player but all the system is much more functional.
For tuning mpd for best sound quality see this website.
$ Wed, 21 Nov 2012 22:39:08 +0100 $ Initial version
$ Tue, 13 Aug 2013 17:39:05 +0200 $ Slightly revised; hyperlinks added.