It is like the Obelisk in 2001. What does it do? No one knows but it is a source of wonderment.

The Black Box is simply put a Windows system designed from the ground up for audio, coupled with our own proprietary sound system (as opposed to an off-the-shelf sound-card) and software stack. We have designed the system solely for the reproduction of high-quality music at any resolution from 44.1kHz to 192kHz and from 16-bit to 32-bit. The case is an aluminum heat-sink with no moving parts inside. The motherboard, processor, and RAM have been implemented in such a way to minimize audio destroying heat and noise. The entire system pulls 35 watts at load.The audio system features I2S (MSB Network), BNC-SPDIF, AES/EBU, and Toslink as well as our own hardware upsampling (user-selectable) via switch on the back of the unit.We understand that there are a lot of questions about The Black Box and we are working to update our web-site to clear up any confusion about the operation of The Black Box, and apologize for any misunderstanding.

Or buy an 600 DOLLAR mac and a decent DAC.

What does snake oil smell like?

It smells like a Black Box and all these other multi-thousand dollar music "servers". When I think of servers I think of a Dell PowerEdge R710, not a Black Box.