PS Audio are the people who gave us internet attached power conditioning so it is no surprise that they are the first to unveil a HRx capable player [almost like being a fax machine pioneer]. As so many other things on this blog it really doesn’t belong here, but it has one redeeming feature making it somehow fit in rather snuggly: It rips, stores and plays, and it connects to the internet.
First the old stuff. The perfectWave Transport rips the CD using the venerable Exact Audio Copy and stores it internally. Then the data is read back and played. This should eliminate timing related jitter by ways of simple buffering. While this idea itself is pretty obvious it wasn’t until Genesis released their Digital Lens in the mid-nineties it started to cost money acquired its flock of followers. Add to this a vendor driven service for downloading album artwork and song lyrics, more or less aptly buzzing it as cloud computing, you have a quite interesting CD transport.
Now the new stuff. The new player now supports the HRx formatted media. Not in itself an audio standard but simply a DVD with WAV files on it at a resolution of 24bit at 176.4KHz.
This is not a streamer. It is not even a media center of any kind. It is quite simply a PC and not a very impressive one at that – spec-wise; an Asus Eee sporting a 15.4” touch monitor and driven by a measly Atom processor. It does, however, have enough power to run a standard media player such as 
The RipNAS is not an audio streamer per this blog’s usual definition but a 
Sporting a wifi connection, wired ethernet and FM reception, this internet radio is very much that; an internet radio. A slick design centered around a pretty colour display and cool navigation controls paired with 
The long anticipated BeoSound 5 was announced yesterday. In terms of surprises the only one appears to be the release timing, in so far that it does not show much novelty over its competition in this segment. One major feature, though, is a system which based on metrics* is capable of selecting other songs similar to the one just finished. More of the same, as it is aptly named. I fear, however, that an equally fitting name could turn out to be Name that influence; when seeded with some middle of the road country tune it starts playing 2.000 hours worth of songs only distinguishing themselves from the seed track by lyrics and cover art. 
Well, I guess it can be turned off.
I mentioned the 
This one had me sold by looks alone. It doesn’t even come close to being an audio streamer. What it is, though, is one cool looking iPod dock.
The amplifier is built specifically to drive a set of accompanying speakers. The output transformer has been built into the speakers to keep the amplifier’s form factor down and thus its cuteness factor up.
The Resolution Audio IXS is not included on the Resolution Audio web site yet, so this is pretty much a concoction of spottings.
CD drive
Wifi
Flac audio
Digital IO
Ogg-Vorbis
uPnP support
Video