


I am not dissing a mac mini, but even though its 'cheap' its still very expensive, and for the same money you could get a more modern NUC for instance that is faster. Most every PC this past 15 years has HDMI out The Mac Mini can sit unobtrusively on one of the racks, it's probably going to share a shelf with my phono pre.


I'd end up spending at least double to get a comparable NUC, and still need to bolt stuff on to get digital output. Not to mention that as a one-shot purchase to do a bit of music serving, I can't think of a cheaper way of doing it without going to something like a Raspberry Pi based system, which is far too much faffing around at this point. 2) It has digital out as standard - so connects easily to my DAC/Pre.ģ) free software to do exactly what I want - Plex is a one-stop shop for ripping, organising, playing as far as I can tellĤ) controllable via my home network by VNCĥ) also has HDMI out - so will integrate into my tv/audio system - If I choose to rip DVD's as well, it'll be a full-blown media server without breaking stepĦ) I can also access the mac's hard drives from my PC/Laptop - so transferring over my current music library is easy.
