Let me support this with a more general observation about system architectures, beyond the world of audio.
I have been a software architect for 45 years. We used to think of systems running on “a computer”. But no more. And certainly not in the next 45 years. All modern system architecture is disaggregated and distributed. Computers in a network. Computers connecting to the cloud. The systems running in the cloud. (Cloud services do not run on “giant servers” as suggested in a Spotify thread, they run on a vast quantity of cheap commodity servers.) A car has hundreds of computers. Each “computer” is really a network of separate processors, not just the cores we know but specialized processors, some high powered for advanced work, some miserly with power consumption. Power is a very big deal, both because of battery life and because of cooling. We can’t make computers faster because they melt, but they are cheap so we can have many of them. “Many” doesn’t mean tens, it means thousands and millions.
So we have a recursively distributed system. Nowhere is there a trend to tight coupling, toward a single box.
Having many systems sounds expensive and difficult, to buy and configure and manage. But distributed goes hand in hand with small and single-function.
Small and cheap, easy to configure and manage and service because single-function, easy to replace because loosely-coupled.
These are the trends everywhere. Cloud, internet of things.
The SonicOrbiter and MicroRendu are harbingers of the new world. And ROCK.