Thanks for the responses.
dB Cooper, I'm not so sure about your criticism of the apple tv. I am pretty sure that the apple tv already has - or will be soon - hacked to stream/play just about every format on the planet. And I'm sure more hacks are on the way - the baby has a celeron cpu in it and probably has enough processing power to do lots of fun/interesting things.
Well, sure, but not everyone is going to have the tech savvy to to get that far under the hood, or be willing to void their warranty in the process.
And straight out of the box it already can stream/play apple lossless, which is a format that some audiophiles seem to have embraced to a certain extent.
True, but Apple Lossless is supported only by iTunes. I want to be able to stream any audio on my computer. from any app. And I want to be able to
record video. Then I'll think about it. I work in an Apple store btw, and apart from the early adopter and fanboy types, nobody's buying them. Can't remember the last time I saw one go out the door.
And assuming you have a HD screen (which apparently is a requirement), what a beautiful way to browse and play though your collection! Cover Flow or whatever it's called looks great from the screenshots I've seen.
Dirty little secret: The component vid outputs work with conventional TVs.
What I haven't been able to find is any detailed exploration of its audio internals, which I would suspect are probably barely OK and nothing more.
That's likely true also.