Digital Gear & Upgrade Question, What do I need?

You have tremendous opportunities for improvement. I spent about fifteen years moving from PCs and NAS etc to a good sounding system. I was reluctant to upgrade the streamer portions. Wow, I really wasted time.

You have really good equipment. I recommend stop fiddling around with PCs and JRiver stuff. Borrow, demo, or buy a good Aurender Streamer (or Auralic). You want to put a streamer in the loop that is on the same level as the rest of your equipment. You can put money into internal storage on the streamer… but seriously it is a waste of money in getting anything but the minimum. Streaming off the internet will sound as good or better than locally stored red book CD files. For $14.99 / month you can have access to virtually all music (including what you own) in as high or higher quality.

I used PCs, MacBooks.. for years thinking there should not be a difference… I was so wrong. Given the great quality of your components, I recommend looking at a Aurender N10. It should fit in well with the rest of your system and upgrade the sound quality of your whole system to it’s capability.

In general. High end systems like yours normally will have a separate DAC and streamer. Music management goes on from an iPad. Aurender is known for having a fantastic app. Great for exploring and creating a library. It will cateloge all tunes on local storage, on your network (NAS) and you can add all the streaming albums and tunes to it.

To get the most out of streaming you need a very high quality DAC and streamer. I highly recommend a used Audio Research DAC… perfect complement to your system. Incredibly musical and detailed. Given your budget… if I had to, I would look for a used ARC DAC and either a used Aurender N10 or drop down a level in Aurender. But long term a contemporary N10 or better. They redesigned the power supply on the N10 a couple years ago. Probably making some of the older ones a bit more affordable.

I just want to mention, I have been a long time Audio Research fan for preamps and phono stages, and Pass for amps (last x350). then over the last few years one by one I swapped my components for Audio Research… the wave of surprise and happiness that came over me at each additional ARC component was incredible. Each time the synergy clicked in. Now, with all ARC components my system is the best I have heard. My dealer’s as well… although he sells a lot of stuff that costs more and installs many custom systems of greater value.