Music Server Advice

I can't advise between your options but can comment on the Aurenders. I went from a home-built server with a lot of top-end components to an N10 and the N10 blew the server away.

But the app. It's terrible (others will argue). Aurender is not responsive to improvement requests, from me and many others, including on forums where their US tech maintains a presence- yeah, we'll look into it. But nothing. My comparison is to JRiver. I'm not looking for a JRiver experience from their app, but there are certainly many areas where they could make improvements. Bottom line, however, the app works.

You’re right about vinyl quality. For the brief time I toyed with vinyl again a few years ago I was appalled at the quality of some of the offerings. Surface noise in some cases was obvious, meaning they’re using low-grade regrind material, as well as just plain bad masterings. I won’t get into the pricing lol.

Not sure you’re aware, but there are a few websites for researching recordings and their quality. I often use Discogs, DR Database, and Hoffman Music Corner for this purpose. And AllMusic for music quality. Not for everything, but definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already.