I checked out the archives but did not see anyone wanting to play WAV files on the Rio. I'm assuming that the WAV encoding is trivial so if the player could play WAVs then the server (e.g., JReceiver) could "transcode" simply by decoding and outputting rather than having to do anything real on the output side.

Am I missing something?

Is there an answer to this question? I'd like to stream WAVs as well.

Before you post a reply telling me why I don't need to stream uncompressed audio, read the following list. The reasons below will not dissuade me:

1. You don't need WAVs. You can't tell the difference between WAVs and MP3s anyway.
2. Change your MP3 bit rate to make it higher.
3. WAV streaming will saturate the network.
4. WAV data is too large for the Receiver to properly buffer it at the client side.
   

because:

1. I do. I can.
2. Re-encode all ~5000 tracks? No freaking way man.
3. Nah. CD-quality (44.1kHz stereo) audio is roughly 173KBps. Even a degraded HPNA2 network providing say 500KBps throughput can handle a few streams like this. 100Mbps EtherNet certainly wouldn't suffer.
4. Nah. At 173KBps, it would only take 865KB to buffer five seconds of audio. I believe WinAmp's default streaming buffer (for compressed ShoutCast streams) is only two seconds. I can't imagine the Receiver would be unable to come up with a 346KB buffer... I could be wrong.
   

I don't think any of the clients support wav natively, so you'd have to transcode (using jrec) or re-encode to flac or mp3.

Transcoding isn't the ideal solution because of a delay introduced before the start of play of each track.

Re-encoding is a hassle, granted, but if you choose flac you don't lose anything and gain much: disk space and vorbis tagging. Flac is a lossless codec. See http://flac.sf.net

I am mostly curious about streaming wavs because I wanted to try comparing different formats to mp3s.

For 1,2,3 & 4 above, it seems to me that the Rio's DAC is worse than my CD players and I doubt that the Rio would be good enough to tell a difference between high bit rates compressed and uncompressed data.

Actually, the Rio's DAC is pretty damn good. It's a Burr-Brown PCM1716, which used to feature in mid-price quality CD separates.

Give it a fair listen, with FLAC for example...

Hugo