We need to do a comparo El Presidente.  

Given my new amp a little more time to season and then we should CDApS up and see how they sound.

My mini should be a good to higher quality version of the mini with an i7, SSDs and external power supply.

We'd need to figure out the player that would be available on both.  I never really listen to the Tidal player, but we could have that on both computers.  What else is cross-platform?

Why limit ourselves to same/same cross platform software?

Why not have the same music files, and just see what each system does on it's own merits?

For example, let's just take one of our playlists, load up one of my budget machines with those files, load up one of the experimental Linux machines with the same files, load up one of the Apple machines with the same files, and just see what sounds best with whatever native software?  If they are all close to indiscernible that tells us something right there.  If one system shines above all others, let's drill down and figure out why.

We could still do cross platform same/same, but I don't think that tells us as much as specific built around a certain software system would.

For all we know, Bad Wolf's Linux build might just crush all. But we might not even notice if we limit this to Tidal.

BW's got the boxes ready for us to test. He already told me he wants to buy the 3rd one off me.