Funny how you don't realise how little you know about something until you try to explain it to someone else.
After a long time when for various reasons he wasn't that bothered, my brother has recently revived his interest in hifi, and has discovered computer audio. He's had his old Quad 57s and 44/405 rebuilt, and has been using them in his study fed from the USB output of his Vista desktop PC via one of those Chinese 4396 Ebay DACs. Music is all stored on the PC's internal hard drive although he also has a USB hard drive available.
He's quite happy with all of that, but has now decided he wants to move the Quad amp and speakers into his sitting room whilst retaining the ability to feed the DAC into an ancient Armstrong 621 and a pair of surprisingly good Quad 11L2 speakers he's got knocking around for when he's listening in the study. This means that we need to find a way to feed the system in the sitting room from the PC in the study.
The obvious choice would be a Squeezebox, but I'm reluctant to send him off to look for second-hand gear of unknown provenance, 'cos I know what'll happen.
What's the simplest (and cheapest) alternative?
Oh yes, there is a pair of ancient and horrible phono-phono leads about 20' long buried under the floor from one room to the other, but it's not possible to put in any other cabling without ripping up the recently laid flooring and carpet, which isn't going to happen!