Anyone seen the Ideacentre Q180 that's been getting good reviews of late?
Small, cheap, blu-ray-equipped, and with a handy qwerty remote thingy, looks like an excellent option for a music streamer.
If you already have a decent USB DAC, seems to me that a machine like this offers a lot. You could hard wire it in to your DAC and control music playback and library management from the comfort of your sofa using the little keyboard - which sounds half useful for once.
Then you'd also get internet radio, catchup TV services, multiformat disc playback etc all from one box. I have just bought a new Freeview HD PVR, so will be replacing my old Pioneer DVD / HDD recorder anyway, and was looking at a dedicated bluray player. Since I'm also mulling over streaming options, a unit like this could tick both boxes.
Sounds too good to be true, like a Marantz NA7004 and blueray deck, internet radio, and smart TV all rolled in to one.
The only thing is that I've read some suggestions that the puny Atom processor inside isn't enough to stream video over the web at any kind of serious quality. apparently local playback off disc is fine, but it can't cope with 1080p, or even 720p over the net. Not sure if this is likely or not, or just a reviewer with a thing against atom - said review wasn't from a site I recognised.
Any thoughts? Could be an interesting option.
Small, cheap, blu-ray-equipped, and with a handy qwerty remote thingy, looks like an excellent option for a music streamer.
If you already have a decent USB DAC, seems to me that a machine like this offers a lot. You could hard wire it in to your DAC and control music playback and library management from the comfort of your sofa using the little keyboard - which sounds half useful for once.
Then you'd also get internet radio, catchup TV services, multiformat disc playback etc all from one box. I have just bought a new Freeview HD PVR, so will be replacing my old Pioneer DVD / HDD recorder anyway, and was looking at a dedicated bluray player. Since I'm also mulling over streaming options, a unit like this could tick both boxes.
Sounds too good to be true, like a Marantz NA7004 and blueray deck, internet radio, and smart TV all rolled in to one.
The only thing is that I've read some suggestions that the puny Atom processor inside isn't enough to stream video over the web at any kind of serious quality. apparently local playback off disc is fine, but it can't cope with 1080p, or even 720p over the net. Not sure if this is likely or not, or just a reviewer with a thing against atom - said review wasn't from a site I recognised.
Any thoughts? Could be an interesting option.