Thanks Len for your extensive reply, Arnold for the information about your personal experience with the Denon, and Claude for the DLNA info. And Arnold, if you do yield to the temptation and do a DIY project with the ethernet, please post somewhere! :) Len --- i'll try to respond to your questions since you were so nice to reply (and likewise for anybody else who wants to ask about this!). And thanks for the suggestion about using the multiple HDMI ins on the Denon (presumably on other receivers as well). Maybe that's what i'll have to use, if the HDMI spec allows for cable that's long enough to reach all the computers. But first i should clarify what i want to do, because i don't think i was very clear before. The ultimate ideal state for me would be to use the stereo receiver something like a network printer, so that any of several machines can send it a stream of samples, and it will play them with as little touching as possible. (I would like to avoid having to select an input on the receiver, but that's probably unreasonable.) Everything should be wired, nothing wireless. Further, i don't want to send any analog information to the receiver. Some of these new receivers seem to have very good D-to-A converters, and presumably they are designed just with audio in mind (versus the noisy inside of a computer). So those are the two big requirements for me: (1) that i be able to wire something up and leave it wired up, from several computers, and (2) that it be digital all the way to the receiver. (I guess it's probably possible that i could just dedicate a computer to being a gateway to the receiver, but i would like to avoid tying up a cpu for that purpose.) That's the state i would like to arrive in. Oh --- and of course i want to do it with free software, and these boxes will all or mostly all be linux. Now: as to your specific questions: No, it works fine, but just no digital input, and very unhandy to switch in different computers to the one analog input i have on it for such usage. Very good point, and i wondered about it, and thought maybe somebody on LAU would have such a device and have tried it out (cf Arnold's experience posted later). It sounds like it's probably not the path of least resistance though. (There must be something running on the other side of the port, but probably not so easy to control.) However, your HDMI suggestion may just be the ticket. That's too bad, but what you say sounds right, so that's not a path for me. My ignorance of the world is really unbounded, did not realize that MBs could have spdif out. More gaps in my knowledge! Thanks for sharing all this info. A 'USB audio interface'? I have a pair of usb logitech speakers, but i'd like to be able to send the samples through good speakers (but maybe that's not at all what you mean?). Thanks again Len, and Arnold, and Chris for the info and suggestions and leads. dan PS: Len, sorry for sending you this twice, my fingers slipped before i checked the receivers list. (And man oh man RMAIL is ever so much easier to use than these dang web mail clients.)

Thanks Ralf. I always learn something from your posts. And my knowledge of the state of the available hardware is probably as out-of-date as my receiver. I certainly did not know that "usb audio interface" was a standard term for a piece of hardware that is widely available, so i appreciate being told by you, and earlier Len, about it. So we'll see what we can do! :) dan On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 2:44 AM, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> wrote: