[Bobone]

The development of the Autonomic product line and licensing is interesting...

Early, before 2010, Autonomic and Nuvo cooperated very tightly. You can see it in the SW, but also in the HW. The Nuvo NV-MP was in fact a small piece of HW that bridged between MCS installs on PCs and Nuvo multi-room equipment such as the Grand Concerto and Essentia.
The MPS4 V1 was launched around 2010. It combined a pc mobo running Autonomic’s MCS, the NV-MP bridge and a USB DAC soundcard. V2 was just a hw upgrade 2011-2013.

After that, or due to Autonomics launch of the the MMS hardware series, the relationship starts to falter. As you have noted, the hw in the MMS original series is rather cheap. Especially on the audio side. Somewhat inferior to Nuvo’s MPS4 that has a separate DAC. The lower quality could have been to avoid direct Nuvo competition?

Nuvo thereafter chooses to focus on wireless, like Sonos. They thereby detach themselves further from Autonomic and abandon their wired customer base. Pretty astonishing as the MPS4 could easily have been modified to provide a bridge between the two. Unclear if strategy or owner changes for both companies is behind the break. An unfortunate development as support for the MPS4 ceased. Especially as the V2 Seagate drive proved prone to crash...

Autonomic on the other hand extended their cooperation with Savant, Wadia, McIntosh to essentially clone the MMS/MPS4. With this success, they launched a project to port the MCS C# to Linux resulting in the MMS-e series. It appears to be largely the same core code. Unclear to me if they have now taken a leap with regards to the audio architecture?

The MMS-5A, Savant, McIntosh and MPS4 can basically run the same SW (5.35). Only small changes in settings and cosmetic skins differ.
As the MS500 is the latest(last) in the MCS-windows series from as late as 2018, I was hoping that it had some interesting specs, but apparently not?
Has anyone determined the details of the motherboard?

Furthermore, I am a bit interested in some of the functionality.
Does anyone use their MB100 to control multiroom systems?
If so, is it possible to address individual speakers from a smartphone? I loved this feature!
The ability still exists for AirPlay, but SpotifyConnect to speakers seems to have become broken recently in some Spotify upgrade.
What about for the MB100? Can you launch multiple SpotifyConnect streams (from two different smart phones/accounts) or address the speakers directly from the Spotify app? (Please excuse my limited knowledge of McIntosh’s multiroom abilities.]