I think the thing - the bigger thing - in all of this is how these devices have fundamentally changed how we listen to music. For instance, there are days that I hit 'select all' and 'random', then go about my business. It's pretty cool hearing the Squirrel Nut Zippers, then some Sinatra, maybe some Ben Folds Five, some Zappa etc....

Another fave is to load up a particular genre and hit 'random' ...or make playlists and such.

It's funny to think in these terms; I remember purchasing my NAD 517 5-CD changer and thinking how much of a difference that would make in how I listened to CDs.

There are times that I hear a song (or artist) that I have not heard in ages...and that makes me go back to the Audiotron and maybe queue up that entire CD. That would have never happened with a CD changer.

As far as FLAC is concerned, from what I have read (not enough) it is truly lossless but doesn't offer a dramatic reduction in file size (maybe something like 25%). That never mattered to me though (my motto has been if you don't need to compress, then why compress?) as I have written wav from the start. I figured disk drives would just get cheaper and cheaper - and they have. I guess I'll stick with wav for the forseeable future, and just add anotehr drive when the time comes. Eventually, I will move to a 2TB RAID NAS (because NAS is supported by the Audiotron, and I suspect many others as well).

Regardless of what we are using for our DAR's (Audiotron, SQueezebox, Roku, etc), I just think it's such a profound shift in the way we access our music. I could never see going back. Ever.

Mark