Obviously, you can't have a good whole-house music system [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7] without some dedicated music-playing hardware. In choosing a music player, I gave myself the following requirements:
The only music player that hit the sweet spot of these requirements was the Roku SoundBridge. The SoundBridge is a wonderful little music player that can exist in a number of network, OS, and server configurations. It is quite future-proof.
Natively, the SoundBridge can decode MP3, WMA, AAC, and Apple Lossless audio formats. However, it also supports uncompressed .WAV files, which allows for real-time server-side transcoding of any other audio format, such as WMA Lossless or FLAC.
The SoundBridge also supports two widely used server protocols: UPnP/DLNA, and iTunes, both of which are widely available on almost all platforms. It works perfectly with Windows Media Player 11 sharing as well as Apple's iTunes sharing.
The latest firmware for the SoundBridge adds a feature that I never expected to want, but I use all of the time: Internet Radio. Roku maintains a large database of various audio streaming sites, and presents them in an easy-to-navigate format on the SoundBridge. This setup beats the pants off the local radio stations and cable TV music channels.
And finally, the sound quality is outstanding. I rip all of my music from CDs in lossless audio formats, and playback on the SoundBridge is absolutely perfect.
The only downside I've noticed is that once every few months, the SoundBridge will stop connecting to the server. I suspect this is related to my network's wireless configuration. To fix the problem, I simply restart the SoundBridge using the "restart" option on the menu. It only takes a few seconds, so this is more of an annoyance than a major issue.
I have 3 SoundBridges on my network at home, an M1000 and two M500's. Roku sells the latest SoundBridge M1001 on their site, but you can find M500's and M1000's pretty easily on eBay. And if you can get the large-screened M2000, all the better. Audiophiles might actually prefer the older units, as they pass bitstreams in their native resolution, whereas the M1001 upconverts all audio to 48Khz. Most users, however, probably won't notice the difference.
In summary, I highly recommend the Roku Soundbridge as a dedicated music player for a whole-house music system.
