Hi Gary

You are entitled to your view as much as anyone if Jriver works for you and you feel it delivers then that's great.

Will happily say it sports a great user interface and catalogs with the best of them and sounds fine end of.

Certainly not the best sounding commercial available player (imho), however it is purely what the buying public wish to pursue and ease of use and simplicity is the top of 95%+ end users list of preferences which is what Jriver is very popular unquestionably.

It also works robustly which is another pre requisite of the buying public choice.

No sales pitch for me at all, just merely observations A GUI is essential for everyone, they key is getting the performance to work with an acceptable GUI, tagger, internet data capture etc.

This is particular project for me is trying to marry up the raw performance without compromising the SQ that having to use any part of internal cpu graphics section to a degree you encroach on SQ.

Just for the record I wrote a particular player some four years ago Gary, its clunky to use, not particular easy to adjust and most people would hate to work it  however it does produce music rather well.

At the the NAS show a couple of rooms were using JR19/20 with thunderbolt (battery powered and without), trick usb leads etc, and every room they were used in had a distinctive 'produced sound' despite all of them using different amplifiers and speakers. Maybe it is a Jriver house sound possibly?

The question is an easy one to answer if you like the sound then no problems, if you don't then you have few alternatives.

If you have time try this one, I have nothing to do with this company at all, however his theory is sound and the inventor has more than a smattering of intelligence. Though he can be somewhat forthright in his views

Signalyst HQ player

As always a difference of opinion is very human and we all wish to improve ourselves so on occasions we challenge the norm.