[Originally posted to my gaming blog on July 21, 2012 . . . when Posterous was having issues. Moving the post here to clean things up at the gaming blog. Also, there will be a related post here that touches on the topics of MPD and MPD clients in a few days . . . or a few weeks! ;) ]
What? A post about something other than gaming? Well . . . Posterous is on the fritz a lot of late; and I may just start posting some of the more random stuff here instead of hassling with the fail over there.
The Auraliti PK 100 is advertised as an audiophile grade music player. It has no storage of its own, you can hook up to 3 or 4 USB drives on the one I have. The PK 100 is a small fanless PC that decodes FLAC, WAV, AIFF and MP3 files (the latter not mentioned in the docs, but claimed to work by one reviewer - will test later). It then either processes the digital audio stream itself using its built-in DAC (outputs analog stereo via standard RCA) or sends the stream to an external DAC of your choosing via S/PDIF (it has a BNC connector for this). All of these functions work great.
The PK 100 must be controlled over your local network (and thus must be connected to it) via your PC, Mac, iOS or Android devices. The folks at Auraliti recommend getting started with the NeoMPC web app. Here is a screen shot of the Browser screen where you can select tracks to add to the device's play list [in NeoMPC]:
And finally here are the basic but "good enough" playback controls:
So far . . . and it is still early days . . . I'm liking this device.
[August 31, 2014: two years on and I am still using the PK 100. I have nothing bad to say about it. I did buy the linear power supply to deal with locations where AC is not so clean, but try it with the wall wart first!]