I have been using an apple TV for a while and I am very happy with the concept. You can manage a large audio/video collection on your screen without changing disks.
However, at this time, ATV appears limited as far as the quality is concerned. As far as I understand it, Apple TV is limited to CD quality (or maybe 48khz, I am not sure), can't play HD audio, and is limited to 720p. Moreover, iTunes is not able to play several interesting formats including FLAC.
I just got The Beatles USB remastered compilation (which is great by the way). It contains a FLAC version that iTunes can't play. This has opened my eyes to the availability of higher quality audio files on the internet than what you can find in the iTunes store (I just finished browsing the Deutche Grammonphon site for example).
This got me thinking (and reading). Ideally, I would like to have the ability to put all my media (CD, SACD, DVD-Audio, FLAC files, BD, DVD, etc.) on an Apple TV like device which can manage an audio video collection and feed it digitally to my receiver/TV without quality limitation.
This is quite obviously the way of the future. I assume that all of this is not possible at this time. Apple TV reamains a great device for what it does, but I would also like to be able to manage and use higher quality files.
Any thoughts or advice?
Starting more modestly and realistically from the audio end only, I am looking at the following possibilities in order of complexity:
-copying FLAC files to a usb key or SD card and having my Onkyo receiver or Denon BD player read it. Not very friendly from a library management point of view. I a going to try this as a first step.
-Buy some mac compatible software wich is DNLA compliant and stream the files from my mac pro to the Onkyo receiver.
-Buy some type of dedicated device like the logitech transporter.
-Use a mac min as a HT computer and attempt to connect it to the HT system.
Again, any thoughts or advice?
