Touch screen phones were around several years before iPhone, e.g Ericsson P800.

I think you mean "pedants".

Before WWII? I think you've been reading the same history book as Dave Cameron (the one where the UK and USA are fighting together in 1940).
There's no question that the UK was a major power 60 years ago.
A better case could be made for ~1955, but even in 1966 Britain was able to argue that its global reach amounted to shouldering enough of an anti-communist burden to justify staying out of Vietnam.
The Falklands War is quite interesting here, not because it demonstrated some lingering imperial might, in fact the opposite - the UK depended heavily on the USA. Where it gets special is that this help was given (initially) without approval from the White House, solely by virtue of long-established intelligence and military links.

Steve Bell

Hmm he has a web site now, great... should be in there somewhere then! (Look for Lord Young hunched over a desk pronouncing his EU vision).

Steve Bell ~1983

What, they should pay you?

Well the stream comes from Squeezebox Server on the PC so it's just a hardware-software match rather than a hardware-hardware one like Sonos.

And they're doing pretty well so far, longevity-wise - my SlimDevices Squeezebox 3 has upgraded itself to the latest Logitech-branded firmware and works with a new Boombox, and the latest software & services of course.

(redundant bit) As someone else has pointed out, this is incorrect - the Squeezebox players decode FLAC, MP3 etc. directly from the stream.

(non-redundant bit) And the Squeezebox Server is a very useful central controller for setting up plugins, playlists etc.

I guess the Sonos players can also synch to each other tightly so that playing the same thing in multiple rooms works nicely? The physical Squeezebox players do, but the version you might run on a PC (Squeezeslave) doesn't as far as I know.

And if you're paying in GBP, you'll probably be interested in the BBC iPlayer plugin which is very convenient. No neat Spotify integration yet but it's on the cards.

Is there a purist option which would allow me to flip between merging sources via mixing/resampling and letting the bitstream through to the digital output unmolested (e.g from a FLAC file)?

Part of my confusion is that I don't know how volume is supposed to work with digital outputs - is the mixer supposed to simply reduce the amplitude or does it encode a separate volume setting in the PCM stream?

Ta for any info - I've looked but not found anything in the PA docs.