Just to add my two cents...and answer a different aspect of 73Bruin's question:

There are some devices (like Sonos) that can stream music from any PC or NAS device over standard file sharing protocols. Looking at the slimdevices website it looks like the squeezebox requires that their software be installed on the system(s) with the music, which would preclude putting your music on a dedicated NAS device.

An alternative would be to have the NAS device present the music folder as a share to the system running the Slimserver software, but this would require running two systems.

Some more cents to add...

You can stream Internet radio to the Squeezebox (SB) without the PC being on. To stream your CD collection, the PC must be on with Slimserver (the software that supports SB) running. If your sound system and computer on are different floors, and you don't like the idea of running around the house to power up your system, no worries... you can configure the SB to "wake" your computer and turn on Slimserver when you power on the SB.

Regarding gonk's points, the SB is very easy to set up and is basically a plug and play unit. I know very little about computers, and it took me no time to get things up and running. Another bonus of the SB is that it handles lossless formats like FLAC and has a pretty respectable onboard DAC.

Hey Videodrome, I'm glad you're liking the SB. I've been eyeing this product for a while now. I want it more for my bedroom than anything else. My PC is fairly close (~25ft) to my stereo & is connected via a digital coax cable I bought from Bluejeans cables. This makes it easy for me to play my tunes or Internet radio in Winamp & listen on my stereo.

I've been contemplating the SB for the bedroom for some time now. I am about 20% complete in ripping ~1200 compact discs to my computer. I'm not into compression & am leaving them as .wav files. I'm using EAC to rip & have 2 Plextor PX40TSi SCSI cdroms doing the work, with a Pioneer DVD for backup (it's much slower but better with protected media).

I hope to pick up a SB very soon