Your comments remind me of what I hear....
Aeris by itself yielded a subtle amount of greater resolution compared to having Criterion in the chainreminds me of removing my preamp and using one of my passives, either a Goldpoint passive preamp or Endler attenuators direct to amp, and
with Criterion in the chain, you would experience a subtly warmer presentation that admittedly is quite intoxicatingwhich is similar to what I hear through my preamp, which is a no gain, buffered unit with external choke power supply and Shallco discrete resistor volume control constructed using Audio Note tantalum resistors. The main difference from your situation is my preamp doesn't add noise.
It seems most here end up preferring a preamp in their systems, including those who have used a volume control implemented by changing the reference voltage of the dacs, such as with the ODSE. One reviewer, Steven Plaskin at AudioStream, slightly preferred having the Ayre KX-R preamp in his system to running the ODSE direct to his Ayre MX-R amps, even with the Final Drive buffers in-line.
Not using the volume direct to amps approach would make a jump to the Adagio less attractive, even though it is said to sound better than the Pavane because of the significantly increased reference voltage and doubling of the number of dacs. I really need to find one to audition to find out for sure how much better it sounds and whether I could live with it direct to my amps. For now, I will be happy to replace the mac mini I have been listening to for the past couple of weeks with my fully upgraded Antipodes DX, which arrives on Friday, with Roon and the option to use the newly added S/PDIF output instead of USB. Kudos to Antipodes for supporting existing customers with upgrades and for staying at the forefront of server technology.