I've been thinking about a question that some here might be able to answer, having been able to compare multiple digital setups. For the record, I'm still running oxford chipset FW 7200rpm hard drive - 6" firewire cable - tiger-era itunes - core2 duo mac mini - DB Audio Labs USB cable - tranquility SE DAC for my front end. I do also have a gen2 Salk Streamer sitting in a box waiting for me to buy a router before I can use.
Last I was shopping around for digital front ends, there was a lot to be said about the little things regarding how the music file data got to the "renderer" (current term) - USB vs. Firewire vs. optical, make/model of the cabling, speed and brand of the connected hard drive, even the chipset of the controller on an external hard drive enclosure were discussed as having an effect on the sound. Put more shortly, as is often the case in audio, 'everything matters'.
What I wonder about when folks bring up products like the microRendu is the part about it being an ethernet streamer. Comparing to the capability of something like the Salk Streamer, pulling music data from a local drive on in that case an internal data bus, does something like the microRendu lose something in the sound pulling its data through the TCP/IP stack over the network (even if that network is only the renderer and a NAS, as a hypothetical absolute minimal example)? It was explained to me a long time ago that things like harmonics and overtones were some of the most delicate parts of the music to preserve in a digital signal chain, and these very "analog sounding" properties were the first to go if the data path as a whole wasn't carefully optimized, leading to the often negative bias between even higher quality digital and analog.
So, put another way, to those who have tried a few different digital setups, purely from a sound quality standpoint, has anyone noticed a difference - good or bad - streaming music data from a network source (even if buffered locally at the end before rendering) compared to pulling that same music data from a local storage source optimized for sound quality?
I assume for sake of the discussion that there really isn't much way to optimize how data would be streamed to a renderer over a network as once the music data hits the network it is treated like any other piece of data getting passed around. Although, now that I think about it, it might be interesting to see if prioritizing traffic from a music source via QoS on a router (or commercial-grade switch) would change or improve the sound from network fed renderers? How about configuring the NAS, music server, and renderer on a dedicated VLAN versus just running everything on a single logical network? Maybe a silly question, but do different network cables sound the same?
King, please pardon the minor technical aside involving network configuration; all of the above is really getting into the far tweaking end of the pool, as the products you've asked about have by far and away improved on being more 'just plug it in and go' type of equipment compared to those early on who cut the early (earlier than me for sure) trail in digital front ends. Actually, one of the main reasons I want to try out the Salk Streamer is the same as you - find an alternative to running my music from a multi-purpose computer.
