Getting a tube radio loooong ago, the hifi virus hit me and never left.
Starting with a Philips tube radio when I was young and upgrading bit by bit since then, I finally ended with a set of TL speakers combined with a hefty audiophile current dumping amp and a DAC/preamp. No thingies between my audio source and the main amp 
just pure and simple!
With the wish to store all my precious CD’s and listen to high-resolution audiofiles Through Tidal, my search for a nice software solution began.
My logitech squeezebox did this job very well but lacked the native possibility to play CD quality and high-res streams.
Ickstream was a good plug-in solution however, Qnap stopped supporting this platform so I had to find something new…
Audirvana seemed to be a good candidate but the non-intuïtive user interface and the lack of browsing through my audio folders on my NAS didn’t convince me to buy this software.
Then I tried Roon for a year where the same problem appeared: Roon’s mission is to find your music by conected names and does play on many platforms BUT doesn’t let you search through your audio files… A missed chance, especially when you have to pull your wallet and withdraw € 120 every year. You can choose to pay € 500 in advance but with an unsure future and a dynamic development of new software, I didn’t like to pay this amount of money in advance…
Then I stumbled upon Volumio that plays perfect on a raspberry Pi 2 and above. One disadvantage: you have to find or build a stable DC cirquit to keep noise and switching peaks out your audio signal…
The solution: an Intel NUC with a bit more power than my Pi and the possibility to copy all your music to a SSD inside this NUC.
No NAS running and a super low power usages.
My challenge: how to write the X86 image (that even runs on an USB stick connected to my I3 laptop) directly to a SSD.
Etcher doesn’t recognise the USB3 to SATA connector and there you are stuck with a laptop…
Any suggestions are welcome 