I preordered an Apple TV back in February and it finally arrived last Thursday. I had previously had a Mac Mini in my home theater system to handle Home Theater PC (HTPC) functionality. I realized that surfing the Internet on the big screen wasn’t too practical and I found it much easier to just go over to my laptop and use the Internet there. That only left me with using Front Row on the machine and I thought it seemed a little bit of a waste of machine. The Apple TV had been released and I figured I would be able to free up a machine for other uses and still get all the functionality I needed for streaming movies and music.

I’ve always been interested in ways of getting my large music collection off my computer and into a decent component stereo setup. Throughout college it was consisted of running a 20 foot mini jack to RCA’s cable from my sound card to the stereo inputs. After college the mini jack to RCA cable just didn’t cut it when I had a real office with the computer and a real living room with the stereo setup. Enter the need for a music streaming device. After a short period of research I selected the Roku setup. It seemed to support everything I wanted to do and was capable of running digital outs along with the standard RCA. I did like the concept of Sonos, especially their color remote. Unfortunately their setup did not include any digital outs (even at the time of writing this article).