It's time to do it! Please, your help....

I have been using a home built PC for a few years now and have never even thought of a network player as what I have is as good and a lot better than most. Most importantly you have to put very good components in it. Use a good gaming board with your main drive split between an OS on one partition and the playback of files on another partition of the same SSD Drive ( Very Important ). Platter drives are fine for storage but SSD's are much better for playback as they are better dither wise. You will need to buy a couple of J Play cards to replace the motherboard USB and Ethernet ports. Also for those two drives you will need a Linear Power Supply as a switching supply from the normal PC supply just won't cut it. The operating system I would suggest would be Windows 10 Pro 10 which has a lot of the annoying Windows apps cut out of it . After that you need a program like fidelizer or Audiophile Optimiser (my preference). The most important thing in computer music systems is getting the Dither down as low as you can and those two cards are great for that and also J Play make a great desktop player which I recommend and also use. Good luck and in the end you should have a system that can stand up to most.

I would certainly go with @boomerbillone post and say that USB cables have shot up in quality lately. My recommendation  would be the CAD 11 cable. It is very expensive but has lifted my playback quality to levels I have not heard from streaming before. Yes the old style USB printer wires just will not do anymore.