ditton,

i think the real definition is noisy and quiet - an ipod isn;t solid state (well the shuffle is i guess) it's still got a hard drive in it which spins and requires mechanical gubbins to recover the data.

building a silent pc isn;t a huge chore and neither is siting it in a closet somewhere out of the way so i'd not worry too much about physical noise.

interference from neighbors systems can be eliminated by using a wired network rather than wifi and it means you can microwave things without dropouts too.

i think the biggest 'must' is having a dedicated music server though - i use a very old p2 400 with 256 mb ram and about 1/2 tb of sata hdd's i also use this as my print server too. even this improved things with my original sbox after running the server on my laptop for a while.