In my way of thinking source components are a better natural home for the kinds of content oriented services that often change their terms / offerings.
While I certainly don't deny that certain amounts of convenience can be had by incorporating an Ethernet port for firmware updates, the overhead of having to build in circuitry and code to make these seldom used options a reality are not enough to make me say it is that much better than a USB connection.
Finally if your desire is to have some kind of "digital hub" it is my contention that such a product is fundamentally different than an audio- centric pre-pro. Beleive me I know that the range of products that purport to enable you to stream content to multiple zones in your home in relative fidelity / ease are far larger than the handful of products that actually fulfill this promise. I doubt those are waters the Outlaws would currently find profitable to dive into...
I looked at source components as a streaming hub but they didn't seem to offer all the codecs I was interested in using. Many of them offered quite a few just not the ones I deemed best suited me. They are limited on input output ports
I also looked into very nice DAC's but LAN ports on these seem to be rare. Inputs are few and I need to stream audio and video and I am not sure they will, I gave up quickly when I had a hard time finding reasonable priced DAC's with LAN ports.
HTPC seemed to be the ticket but audio fidelity was always a question. After many hours of research and a great deal of discussion on audio forums I didn't feel comfortable with a motherboard, processor, sound card combination I felt would do the job. Everyone agreed that it really came down to the dac that was in the HTPC. And if I was just passing digital data through the HTPC why would I need it?
Really the only component to stream digital data that makes sense in a relatively high end "home theater / audio system" is the brain of that system, the pre/pro or AVR. Fundamentally it is the perfect choice.
The pre/pro already has a high end DAC, It processes digital and analog information, it has a ton of inputs many digital and I can access my music with ease. The pre/pro is already playing in the DA playground how hard could it be to add LAN to it. I am not sure why my computer or my NAS would be any different then any other digital component other then the number of codec's they are capable of running.
I cant remember if I read or watched this on TV but the CEO of Samsung talked about his company. He said that in 5 to 10 years all digital media will be streamed through the internet. If you buy it or rent it chances are you will stream it. There is already more music bought and downloaded on the internet then sold in stores.
Blockbusters, Hollywood Video, Hastings are all but gone around here. I really don't care about streaming directly from the internet. I am more concerned about streaming very high quality from my NAS or computer.
P.S these last several posts are a yes to my question right? "The 978 will not have a LAN port for sure." Sorry still willing to wait if there is a chance. lol
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