Audiophile Raspberry Pi

Lifehacker has a post on a audiophile Raspberry Pi distribution. I'm hardly an audiophile but this might be a good way to add audio nodes, possibly of better quality to my Airplay based whole house audio system. The key would be to integrate RAOP, which is reverse engineered Airplay. The same Lifehacker author has an earlier post on using Raspberry pi as an Airplay receiver, but it looks like it's based around XBMC. As is, I'm not sure how well it will work headless.

Another option might be a TP-LINK TL-WR703N Router based solution. It looks like it is possible to add the OpenWRT based firmware with Airplay implemented either yourself, for as a commenter mentioned, an already built system is available for sale for about half the price of a new Airport Express.

Update (9/11/13): A commenter on the Lifehacker post says the RaspyFi distro supports Airplay out of the box. I didn't see any documentation that supports this, but the RaspyFi forum seems to suggest this is true.