I have the Arete cable and have been using it for about 6 months+. From what I've experienced, the cable was designed for the TF10 which means it will fit the FLC8s but isn't perfect. What I assume this does is put stress on the housing of the connectors and I've had the plastic blow out on me...

This happens to me once in a while but not nearly as frequently as you have been experiencing. This might have something to do with stability of the app in conjunction with android. What I've noticed is that the onkyo app reads the SD card faster than 3rd party music apps so there might be...

Is anybody using 3rd party music apps with SD cards? I'm finding that it sometimes stutters when playing large flac files but this doesn't seem to happen with the stock onkyo/pioneer music player.

I'm from NZ as well. Where do you get your audio equipment from? I've been using computer lounge. I've just ordered a pioneer 300r which worked out to be 570NZD off Amazon JP.