Is this the ultimate streamer? (and costs less than $150)

[Harmonic Distortion]

Hi everyone.... I have been following ASR for a while now but this is my first post (undergoing pre-posting anxiety disorder as I type)

It looks like finding a nice looking, functional and easy to set up streamer at a reasonable price is everyone's dilemma. I've been using volumio on RPi and I cannot say I'm 100% happy although I can't complain about something that costs only $50 and does a great job.

Few days ago I bumped into this small windows PC that costs around $100 USD and comes with a pre-installed Windows 10 and actually looks nice. All the connection are in the back and there is no ugly usb port in the front. You could run any media server app you like on this and I guess it would be able to handle the load nicely. Lot's of connectivity options as well for external or network storage... power efficient and could be easily sent to sleep or wake up. What do you think? Should I add it to the cart or this cannot beat a Bluesound streamer?

Amazon.ca link:
https://www.amazon.ca/x5-Z8350-Grap...ild=1&keywords=mini+pc&qid=1612752505&sr=8-11

Thanks for reading, and it's nice to be part of a scientific audio community!

 

[BillG]

It could definitely be remote controlled via a number of different applications - Ex. I'm running Emby Server on my Windows computer, and I'll occasionally remote control it as a media player via the Emby Android app on my phone. Then we've applications like Remote Desktop which broadcast the Windows desktop to a smartphone/tablet for remote control.

Windows computers can also be set up as UPnP/DLNA stream renderers (players) as well.

There's even software which enables them to act as a Chromecast, but I've had little success with it the few times I've tried - it may just be my particular configuration that's stopping it, though.