James,
I really think you are ahead of your times with this product and you've hit a home run.
It's taken a while for me to get used to this type of product (I own a touch - streamer), but the more I look at the BDP-1 the more I like it's concept.
I have been waiting for years for something like this, just a high end streamer with no dac built in. I largely blame the iPod mentality for the distraction away from streaming music off of a centralized server and the internet which many were already doing before the iPod.
I bought a Turtle Beach Audiotron in 2001 which is basically a network streamer. It's a standard 1u/17" wide device with a 2x40 display. It will play files from a windows network share and again from the internet but it is limited in many ways, it will only play wav, mp3 and windows media stuff, not protected. The spdif also will only do 32k and 44.1k but the built in sound will encompass stuff like 22khz and play it out the analog ports. It'll play 48k streams but the sound is slow, like playing a 45rpm record at 33 speed.
Back then (ten years ago) we hounded TB about FLAC support and ogg etc but they made an excuse that the device didn't have the power to decode. I suspect the fact that it was CE powered that they probably could not incorporate the Codecs. There was a workaround though if you were running a Samba server in Linux and that was using perl scripts to convert to wav on the fly and flac files were seen as wavs by the Audiotron. In 2004 TB discontinued the device and later on discontinued Turtle Radio. We learned of a secret password to set the Audiotron to look for an xml file in a windows share or in my case Samba. I have an Excel tool that allows editing this xml file. I still use this as well as a Squeeze Touch. The Audiotron will not play aac streams so for stuff like DI.fm's premium and Jazzradio, I simply use the higher rate mp3 streams. I believe the device actually predated 2001 as one of the major PC OEM's had it and then sold it to TB.
All this time the closest thing was Squeezebox but it required a special server which was more difficult to set up on some Linux distros than it is now and the idea of running a windows based music server sickened me. There were also a plethora of media players with built in hard drives which I also thought were the wrong approach. Also as I lamented many times, we saw iPod docking stations and more docking stations. It was difficult to find any Audio news without seeing yet more iPod docking stations and they still keep coming. Enough already! I never liked the ipod and it's codec support. It's useless to me. Put a tube output or eny exotica you can throw at it and it is still centered on an iPod and it doesn't get any better. I blame the HiFi manufacturers for getting caught up in this dead ended nonsense. When I walk into my home, the music should just be there on my server and ready to play on real audio equipment at the push of a button. I shouldn't have to pull my phone or music player device out of my pocket and plug it in first.
I do have a squeezebox touch which works well but I don't really know what to do with it. It looks a bit out of place in my stereo system and I usually use the remote anyway. What I really wanted was something like the transporter without the built in DAC. I see no point in building a DAC into something when you will bypass it soon anyway when a better DAC comes along. When I saw the BDP-1 and what it was made of, I got pretty excited. I'm very familiar with the hardware inside, especially the modified ESI Juli@. Yes, just give us a bit perfect output and we'll do the rest. Now where to buy one? I'm in Everett, Wa.
