[BC] Internet tuner

[Dana Puopolo]

>From: Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com>
>------ At 02:55 PM 11/24/2010, Dana  Puopolo wrote: -------
>
>>Oh, one more thing...if you buy this at the Grace web site (www.gracedigitalaudio.com)  and use the discount code: grace40 you'll get 40% off your order-so the unit only costs 78 dollars, shipped free.
>
>I like the tuner. I'm just wondering why there's a need for coax and optical outputs. Internet audio isn't high enough quality to demand a digital connection. I can only guess that the digital output might include the cover art and liner notes data if it feeds a device that can display them.

The tuner's USB port can play audio off a USB drive, It can also play audio from computers on your network, do playlists, etc. In this way it's a lot like the Logitech Squeezebox-except that the Squeezebox uses software on a computer running somewhere on your network to transcode some types of streams, while the Grace does it internally. It has the digital outputs because many A/V receivers, preamps and amplifiers now include digital inputs. Remember, the quality can be there-especially if you are playing WAV files located on your network. There are also a few 320 kbps MP3 radio streams out there (Radio Caroline for example)-and 128 kbps and higher AAC also sounds great. 

What I'm curious about this unit is how well it reconnects after losing a stream. If it does so well, it could do the job of a Barix Exstreamer for less than half its cost. 

-D