The BDA-2 is a fairly high end DAC, right? So why would the OP want to buy a new player that has its OWN DAC, like the Aurender? Do you think that an Aurender + BDA-2 would be appreciably better than a properly configured mac -> BDA-2? I'd be a little surprised, but am not judging, just saying. The DAC in the aurender is pretty good though, right? So maybe that would be a better solution - just sell the BDA-2 and use the $ to buy Aurender?
FWIW Tunes -> audirvana works pretty well for a lot of folks for about $80 for the software. Worked pretty well for me at least.
Personally, I'd humbly suggest that it would might be worth playing around with the mac first before investing in another box. I'd second the suggestions about bitperfect, and audirvana (again, worked well for me into a bifrost and later into a Schiit Yggdrasil). Might also try different power supplies etc. Also he/she didn't say anything about file formats, so we're not sure if they're compressed low-res files, or sweet lossless ones. Given the BDA-2, would suspect they're in a reasonable format though.
If the OP is going to invest some $ - just throwing it out there - maybe a Bryston player (BDP-1, BDP-2, or Pi) playing from a NAS or maybe from an external HD might be another step up the audio chain - maybe? The pi at least is not crazy expensive. After using a an old Mac -> audirvana -> Schiit for a while, I wound up making that step but I've got to say that, for me, a bigger bang for buck was installing audirvana - i.e audirvana -> gungir was probably at least as good as awful iTunes -> Yggy.
One question I'd like to bring up is: NAS vs attached HD? In the AS review of the BDP-2 they said that direct connection sounded better than NAS, which would seem to contradict some of the advice above. No personal experience with that, just sayin' what they said. Could see it working both ways, the total isolation of NAS from player with electrons flying through space vs a close and friendly external HD sharing noisy power supplies? Would be a good experiment ....
FWIW Tunes -> audirvana works pretty well for a lot of folks for about $80 for the software. Worked pretty well for me at least.
Personally, I'd humbly suggest that it would might be worth playing around with the mac first before investing in another box. I'd second the suggestions about bitperfect, and audirvana (again, worked well for me into a bifrost and later into a Schiit Yggdrasil). Might also try different power supplies etc. Also he/she didn't say anything about file formats, so we're not sure if they're compressed low-res files, or sweet lossless ones. Given the BDA-2, would suspect they're in a reasonable format though.
If the OP is going to invest some $ - just throwing it out there - maybe a Bryston player (BDP-1, BDP-2, or Pi) playing from a NAS or maybe from an external HD might be another step up the audio chain - maybe? The pi at least is not crazy expensive. After using a an old Mac -> audirvana -> Schiit for a while, I wound up making that step but I've got to say that, for me, a bigger bang for buck was installing audirvana - i.e audirvana -> gungir was probably at least as good as awful iTunes -> Yggy.
One question I'd like to bring up is: NAS vs attached HD? In the AS review of the BDP-2 they said that direct connection sounded better than NAS, which would seem to contradict some of the advice above. No personal experience with that, just sayin' what they said. Could see it working both ways, the total isolation of NAS from player with electrons flying through space vs a close and friendly external HD sharing noisy power supplies? Would be a good experiment ....