Thuaveta

There's a scarier question here: "what does it say of Tidal / Qobuz if their UI is so bad that customers have to pay an extra $10 a month to have something workable ?"

By "Canada", you certainly meant "Congo", now didn't you 😛

Well, it's one more real-time, isn't it ? It's not 99. You see, most blokes, they're going to be doing their real-time at 99, you're all the way up, you're on 99 on your app, where can you go from there ? If you need that extra push to get it over the cliff, what do you do ? Put it up to 100. One higher.

A number of surround receivers have delay built-in, so as long as you have a way to a/d two channels into your current Accourate setup, you should be good by using a receiver's pre-out into your PC, and letting the receiver drive the other channels. Plus, it's AV, so unless you're a full-blooded AV snob, you'll be sufficiently distracted by the moving things being shown at the same time as the sound comes out of the speakers that you won't care about the extra a/d step as much. Getting a receiver with room correction built-in might help getting everything synced up, too.

Since your Lumin is Roon ready, you might want to start there. If I'm not mistaken, with Roon's transport protocol, the player controls the clock, so it should be the same as plugging a HDD into your Lumin. The way you'd go at this is doing a Roon tryout on your computer / iPad, seeing if you like the interface, and if you do, buy a Roon Nucleus locally: dealer support is what you're paying for by not rolling your own, so you're paying them to set it up for you. Nucleus should take a 4TB internal drive. If that isn't enough, you can plug into external USB drives as well, so expandability-wise, you're pretty much set, no matter how big your collection is. You might also be able to ask your Nucleus dealer to set things up for you so that there's backups of your music on your NAS.

Yeap - for those who absolutely insist on spending 5x more than they could, it's a perfect match

FTFY

There's an (expensive) non-subscription version of Roon, but it wouldn't fix your problem: unfortunately, software has a price, and Roon is expensive. If I'm not mistaken, if your Mini runs Mountain Lion, it should at least run Mavericks, if not Sierra / High Sierra. Might be worth hitting the "update" button. You may want to try Plex as a free alternative to Roon - there's phone clients to control it, too. It isn't audiophile certified, but it'll play back FLACs, and you might be able to install it on your NAS.

Try Roon out on your current computer (not NAS), and then track down a 2nd hand compatible NUC if you like it. As long as you're using an SSD for database storage, it'll give you a good enough idea to figure out if you want to go down that path or not. If your computer doesn't have an SSD, start there . Get into the linear PSUs and the other tweakoid stuff once you get the fundamentals down. A Raspberry starter kit should do just fine, add the 5v iFi for peace of mind if you have to.

If you're ok with its limitations (both feature-wise and price-wise), you might be able to get Roon to run on your NAS. If your NAS is not powerful enough, and depending on your comfort with connecting stuff, get an appropriately-sized NUC + a silent case for it (from, say, Akasa), and a Raspberry running ropieee with your choice of output to fit your existing system. Store the files on the NUC, and keep the NAS for backups. Yes it doesn't necessarily fit your "one box that does it all" model, but if you really want that, you can totally connect a NUC running Roon to your current system, and not go through a Raspberry setup, even though there's reasons to why peeps isolate management from playback. Screen-less raspberries (or sparkies or whatever) are small, you don't need stupid fancy PSUs, so it isn't like it's going to make that much of a mess.

Get a c-to-a adapter, be done with it. It's a USB cable, as long as it's in-spec, it'll work.

There's an Ars Technica piece here that explains things better than I ever could. TL;DR: "Microsoft has proactively removed trust of the certificates without requiring any action on the part of end users. Manual removal instructions for Macs and PCs are here and here, respectively."

I'm very open to learning, and i've repeatedly stated as much. I will admit I draw the line at tangible, repeatable evidence, and therefore do not have much patience for space aliens, bigfoot, and magical stones.

That is precisely the problem. Your story is subjective. I hate playing argument by authority, but my "opinion" was a link to maybe one of the world's foremost experts on noise in audio devices, who not only says that you are wrong about your claim about SMPS, but also backs that up empirically. We do not "all know" that "PCs and Mac and various build of each DO make a difference to the sound you end up with". I, for one, think it's completely irrelevant, as long as the output is bit-identical, i.e, that the sequence of 1's and 0's is the same, which it should be, as I believe many others here do. Please do not impugn competent engineering with your religious beliefs. I don't know what you mean by "streaming", but I'd assume you mean what's normally called a "server" - the machine that hosts the file, independently from a playback device. That PSUs are unlikely to make a difference there seems to be something we agree on. As to a DAC connected to a player, whip out the measurement gear on something that's competently designed and prove, in a manner that's repeatable, that there is a difference. This needs to happen at analogue output, because that's where the difference is going to be audible. A word of warning: AFAIK, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong here, no one has _ever_ been able to achieve that, simply because it's impossible to record the sound of someone's (quite beautiful) imagination.

As @wgscott has said before me, you are wrong. You can believe what you want, of course, and spend money accordingly. But please be considerate of newbies, and recognise your very subjective opinion, by either not encouraging them down the path of voodoo at all, or at least having the kindness to qualify your statements. In this case, I think we could all agree that bad SMPS' are bad, much in the same way that bad linear supplies are bad. In my experience and opinion, neither are likely to affect a computer used purely as a server, or a competently designed USB dac attached to it.In other words: nothing justifies spending hundreds, let alone thousands, on a PSU for a computer used purely as a server. If someone has measurements that prove the contrary, please do post them.