Bryston BDP-1 & MinimServer

[DavidHB]

(17-04-2015 22:44)audio_elf Wrote:  Please note: some of what follows is a combination of heresy and inferences so please take it for what you will...

The Bryston BDP-1 (and later BDP-2 and BDP-1 USB) has always been a low powered off the shelf industrial/embedded motherboard coupled with a tweaked sounds card to offer SPDIF and AES (where offered) a "audiophile" power supply and running a version of Linux and the MPd music player. Out of the box it was never going to be easy to auto mount a random share to access music so they stipulated a USB drive.

As time and developments came along they added the ability to mount a share off a NAS or PC as an alternative to a directly attached USB drive and the later BDP-2 added the ability to add an internal drive (iirc) as another alternative. Recently the open source community have come up with the ability to utilise MPd as a UPnP server and this has been incorporated into the main MPd programme (as of version 0.19 iirc)

Thanks for this. It makes sense of the references to the Bryston devices as "computer based" or similar. To my mind, it's a distinction without a difference. All renderers are, in effect, specialised computers.

Your account almost suggests that Bryston made a marketing point out of necessity in arguing that network streaming compromised sound quality (perhaps it did within their design framework at the time). They've obviously been prepared to take on board new developments in the open source world, and should be given due credit for that.

David