What makes a $2,000 digital music player a $2,000 digital music player? When you're Slim Devices, that's a pretty tricky question to answer. After all, its relatively affordable Squeezebox line has garnered extensive praise and a nearly rabid following over the past couple years -- especially in its latest (and most attractive) incarnation. What's more, Slim has positioned the Squeezebox as an audiophile-friendly device from day one, touting its extensive tweakability, high quality digital-to-analog conversion, and compatibility with the surprisingly useful SqueezeNetwork. Don't get us wrong, we suspected there was room in Slim's portfolio for something above the Squeezebox. Something with a larger display, perhaps something that'd fit in an A/V stack. What we never saw coming, though, was a price hike of seventeen hundred dollars over its little sibling. So just what does two large (that's over six Squeezeboxes with the WiFi option, for the record) buy the discerning music connoisseur these days? Let's take a closer look.

From past postings it would seem that Infrant has developed quite a little fan base for its ReadyNAS line of storage solutions, so all you NASheads out there will be happy to learn that the company has just added a new member to the family, the Gigabit Ethernet-equipped ReadyNAS NV+. Available in sizes ranging from 0GB (B.Y.O.HDD.) to 3TB, the four-bay NV+ adds several key features to the previous NV models, including a quieter design, LCD status window, and the RAIDiator 3.0 firmware that boasts enhanced power-saving features and improvements for Mac users. On the multimedia tip, you're getting built-in UPnP support along with SlimServer software (resulting from the partnership with Slim Devices that we recently reported on) for use with your Squeezebox or Transporter. You can pick up your own NV+ immediately, for anywhere between $650 for the diskless version and $2,999 for a massive 3TB black hole of storage.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Slim Devices' Squeezebox and Roku's SoundBridge series are the two best products in the point-to-point digital media receiver market for music. Unlike the AirTunes functionality in Apple's AirPort Express, both products allow you to navigate libraries at the point of listening and neither requires you to turn on your television to hear music as multimedia offerings from a number of other companies. Operating over standard Ethernet or WiFi networks, the third-generation Squeezebox surpasses the sleek industrial design that marked the company's freshman effort, and retains the line's reputation for excellent sound quality when used with capable speakers. The bright vacuum fluorescent display that has long characterized the device illuminates a surprisingly effective and intuitive interface, although the dearth of navigation cues in its two-line presentation can sometimes result in disorientation.

The minimalist appearance of the Squeezebox is actually a facade for a complex array of options. It's actually a client for two content sources -- SlimServer, the browser-accessible open-source server that can run on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows XP, and SqueezeNetwork, a set of Web-based content options. Much of the device's versatility can be chalked up to these sources. SlimServer, for example, has a plug-in architecture that allows the use of iTunes libraries, graphical screensavers, an alarm clock, and what may be the least fun Tetris clone ever created. It also has a large number of arcane configuration options for the advanced user.