For what it's worth, my argument in favour of remote control has to do with the placement of the unit relative to my computer and my stereo. It's all in the same room, to be sure, but my stereo and such are all behind me, which makes changing songs a pain.

Besides, ultimately, I'd like to customize how the system decides what songs to play (ie: move beyond individual song / artist / album / playlist selection and get into heuristics, ratings, etc.). Since a lot of that code is likely to evolve over time, I'd rather have it on my PC / laptop / server / whatever's feeding the Rio, so I can tweak it continuously and have it just tell the Rio what to do and when.

Basically, I'm using the Receiver as a glorified decompressor and DAC

Now, in some cases, I still -do- want to interact with the LCD, IR, and buttons. However, even then, I'm more likely to want to schlep that input back to my server for actual processing, than to handle it on the Receiver itself.

It will be nice when I can go to any receiver in the house and pick what's getting multicast to all the boxes in its group Of course, there's the sync / jitter issue as briefly discussed already...