Matt,
Yes. Empirical is still my reference. I have been given on loan for review gear from a somewhat new company out of South Korea that is very innovative. I hope they find a honest distributor that will treat both the company and consumer well as I believe they have much to contrubute to the community and like Steve Nugent, brings value to the market. For those that do not know Empirical's business model, there is no middlemen necessitating a 400% mark up. I would be surpised if these units are sold 50% above cost.
On a different note, the ethernet would negate the need for a computer server, per se. Instead you have a computer or controller that tells the NAS drive for example to send the files direct to the dac. The files are effectively delivered unprocessed.
The Complete Guide To HiFi UPnP / DLNA Network Audio
on computeraudiophile website is a good reference article and he wrote 3 others on this topic as well.
