Quote Originally Posted by Qwin View Post
Marco - having got interested in FBA, but not yet done anything about it, I came accross this thread.

I have read large chunks of it but find very little detail about what is involved in the way data is handled that makes this system in anyway better than any other.

The number of acronyms means I have to keep going and finding out what is being talked about.
As I see it the Rassperry Pi is a small computer to which you have attached external drives by cat5 cable (your music library) how is this streaming?

I can not see any hard drive on the Pi (got me at it now) does it store its operating system on a flash drive and what is the operating system?

The on board DAC looks tiny, are you just taking the analogue output from this to your amp?
What type of data is the DAC working with and what is the interface (transfer method) USB bus?

The more I look at FBA the less I want to dip my toe in, seems there is so much happening I don't know which way to jump, eg DSD/1bit, kernel streaming etc.

I have an old desk top computer sat with iTunes and about 500 gig of lossles music on it. Its not wired into my system at the moment and rather than bother with it I was looking to build a state of the art FBA system. Like all things audio, it would seem there are many roads to choose from and no consensus on which is best.
The argument over which interface software or library software to use seems to me to be a sideline and has little to do with sound quality and is more about convenience and personal preference. The whole subject is complex and hard to keep pace with in my opinion and detracts from enjoying the music.

Still on the fence.
Don't know much about the Pi, but yes it stores it's operating system on an SD card. It uses Linux.

I guess you could say it's streaming as the data is delivered in packets from the storage device to the Pi via the ethernet cable. This could also be done with a wireless dongle via your router, handy if you wanted to use it in different rooms.