Hey Folks,
I was in the same place a couple months back, and ended up getting on board with the RuneAudio project.
http://www.runeaudio.com/ It's free and open source, and I am both happy and impressed with it.
It's a stripped down Linux build that is made for the Hi-Fi crowd. It lives on a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black. You pick up the parts yourself, download the OS, put it together, and you have a neat little hardwired media center that you can access and control with any tablet or smartphone with a browser. The native analog output on a RaspbyPi is pretty terrible, but there are a few plug and play DACs with straight-to-analog output that you can pick up cheaply (~40 dollar range) and sound just fantastic. I have the HiFiberry, but IQaudIO and Wolfson also have highly regarded models as well.
I can't say I have golden ears, but I have a pretty decent turntable and a nice RIAA section on my pre-amp... the sound coming out of my RPi and HiFiberry is in the same ballpark. For serious. It's even turning heads amongst my non-audiophile friends. For all of you who already have nice DACs, and just want to try the media server end of things, you can also pick up digi-boards that will output your digital signal (via toslink or usb) to your stand-alone DAC. At 4 watts, I like it better than running my (loud) computer as a media center.
It's still in the beta build (0.3 beta as of this writing) so there are a few quirks, depending on how crazy you want to get with your system. But even at this point, my simple rig is super stable. I can run 24/192 files through it easily. It's already so polished, it looks like a proper final release.
All told, I probably have ~100 bucks into this RuneAudio media center/DAC. (Dev board/DAC/power supply/SD card/thumb drive) A little more when you consider the diy chassis. And it was a *really* fun project. Anyways, thanks for reading. Pics or it didn't happen, right?
-Fishstix
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Ugh, white wire on a black chassis. It was off the scrap pile but.... <shudder.> Looks sometimes matter.