With the autonomic music bridge you have to have a streamer to use it, A mms 1/3/5. The music bridge doesn’t do anything on its own. The guy I talked to at cedia said Apple Music is such a resource hog they had to offload the processing for it. The hdmi on the bridge doesn’t do anything, I assume they just use some generic single board computer to run it on, like a raspberry or something because I saw about 5 different devices at cedia that all had those exact same ports.

The ea1 is already being discontinued. It was meant as a single room controller so it was meant to go straight into a receiver. The core 1 which replaces the ea1 has a hdmi and digital coax output. And there is the core 3 and core 5 which have even more outputs.