I got this ARQ 2 for $20 at the local ReStore two or three years ago, as one of those 'this thing is too weird to pass up' buys. When I got it home, I remember plugging it in and finding it was unstable and prone to going into infinite boot loops. After opening it up to see what was wrong, it turned out it's another early 2000's capacitor plague victim, based on a Pentium-III era baby AT motherboard. Not interested in a complicated recap job, I put the cover back on, and it went on a shelf in the basement to be forgotten about.
That is, until I heard a passing mention of ReQuest in Gravis' video on the Dell Digital Audio Receiver, and remembered I had this thing in the basement.
I did a little more digging (mostly on Internet Archive) as a result, and it turns out it's a weirder device than it seems (I'll give you a hint; it's running a unix-like operating system). So this is probably only the first in a series of posts on it, with the next being a teardown and closer look (along with a little history and context), with the eventual goal of integrating the ARQ into my garbage livingroom audio setup.
