I have an SB3 that I run wireless in my living room so I don't have to run a CAT5 cable to from my office and so I have a small, easy interface for accessing my music catalog. I'd rather not have a laptop floating around my very small LR for accessing music. I run the SB3 digi-out to my Sony STR-DA3000ES, mostly at 16/44 for older and studio recordings, 24/48 for newer.
The SB3 interface works well for finding music to which one wants to listen, i.e. one already knows the intended recording. Since it scrolls through recording entries one-by-one, it's not great for browsing, however. As a result, I run Foobar on my desktop in my office and simply run soundcard digi-out to my DAC / rest of playback. An SB3 for listening same-room as the HDD-based music catalog seems like a waste to me.
Wireless comments...
FWIW, at first I had trouble running 24/48 over my Linksys Wireless-G access point (WAP54g v.2). My WAP was 5 thick, old-construction walls away from the SB3, and I had trouble with skipping. I also had trouble with reliable wireless for PC in the same room. Not so much a squeezebox issue as a wireless issue, it turns out. I applied a hacked firmware to my access point to increase it's broadcast strength, and no problems since. Couldn't be happier. I'm totally media-free now in my listening: PC > DAC > Audio Experiences Symphony / McCormack DNA-1 > VSA VR-1s in the office, PC > router > wireless > SB3 digi-out > STR-DA3000ES > VR-1 for living room, and iAudio M3 for portable audio. Love it across the board.
And finally, keep in mind if you move to HDD-based playback, you may want to consider adding redundancy to your PC HDD storage setup, like RAID or
reasonable redundancy without RAID.
The SlimServer s/w's available for download to try out. SlimServer's a little slow to catalog my music every time I re-scan, but...no biggie, I just let it run overnight. For reference, I have 576 "albums" (mostly live, still ripping and storing my studio discs), ~13k songs. No problems with lag-time browsing on the SB3. Any lag-times I've experienced have cleared up when I swap fresh batteries into the remote.
In four simple words: I love my SB3!
I don't know of alternative devices with the same feature set, though it wouldn't surprise me if they exist.