[parisphoto]

I'm currently using a Dell Workstation tower PC to store / play my flacs. My cabinet is quickly running out of room, and I was thinking about an all-in-one, such as the Dell Inspiron 2205 to save some space. I want to stick w/the PC format, and do not want to stream music via a wireless network.
Are there any sound quality pitfalls in using an all-in?
Thanks to all.

[firedog]

You can certainly use an all in one. Lots of people even use basic netbooks as their music servers.  Music serving and decoding is a trivial task for today's PC's.

I don't know exactly what you have in mind, but on the simple level the best sound will be obtained if your music server is used only for that - and not to do other computer related tasks.

Depending on how high a sound quality you are looking for, you can start doing things like shutting off unecessary processes on the server, using ASIO, Kernel streaming or WASAPI drivers, and getting a specialized USB DAC. I don't know if you are interested on that level, but there's lots of information on the net about how to get optimum sound from a PC, if that's where you want to go.

[parisphoto]

I'm currently using a desktop PC as a dedicated server. Two internal disc drives, one for the OS and applications, the other for the music library. Sounds fine, but I just would like something smaller. I understand that any USB output to the DAC should not be shared with any other peripherals, which makes a laptop problematic. Some of the All-In-Ones use blue tooth for the external mouse & keyboard, which may help the shared USB problem. A small PC like the Dell Zino seems popular, but I understand that they run a bit hot, which may lead to premature failure.

[eclein]

I use my laptop and I even had the music files for a time on this machine and ran it wired to a Squeezebox. All while I do all my daily surfing and emailing and general screwing around. I have since put my music on a couple external USB drives hooked up to the laptop and it still acts as a server for my Squeezebox Touch. So now I just run Squeeze Server and let it tell what files to run from the USB drives to my SB and I do not take any type of performance hit that's noticeable to me. This laptop is about 2 years old, nice Sony VAIO was spec'd out well so with today's stuff I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

[Vincent Kars]

I understand that any USB output to the DAC should not be shared with any other peripherals, which makes a laptop problematic.

Not really.
First of all a lot of laptops have more than 1 USB hub.
If needed you can even use the device manager to check if the hub is shared with other devices.

If the laptop comes with a SATA or Firewire you can use these for e.g. external HD.
I run Win7 on an iMac with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Guess what? Yes, the internal Bluetooth is connected to a USB hub!

[charmerci]

If I were doing that - I'd just get a external HD - download all the music into that - then get a Squeezebox Touch and connect the external to that.