Please Help!! looking to get into computer audio.

@whinoman The Sonore microRendu is a remarkable sounding network media player and streamer which has exceeded the performance of many other higher priced solutions. The catch is that it has one ethernet input (so you store your music on a Network Attached Storage aka NAS drive) and it has one USB output(so your dac must accept USB). The built-in Regen technology and the carefully designed USB implemention is so much better than most USB implementations that any biases against USB have to be set aside until you hear it. 
Read the two big reviews by Chris Connaker & Michael Lavorgna. It really is in another league vs. most typical computer audio setups. You can see it attached to the back of my DAC on my system page here. Cheers,
Spencer

You do not need a NAS drive for the microRendu.

Instead you can just use any computer on your home network running one of the microRendu compatible servers, such as LMS (Logitech Media Server) or MinimServer - both of which are free. The music files themselves must then be fed into that computer; an external hard drive works well for storing the music.

And you need some kind of control point app on your mobile device. For example, I use the Lumin app on my iPhone or iPad to control the music playing through MinimServer.

But yes, the microRendu is a great little digital music gizmo.

Yes, you can run the microRendu without a NAS in some setups, but most don't. Part of the beauty of it is that it's like a Swiss Army knife, so you can use it with NAS running Mimimserver(free) and control your music on tablet with free apps like Lumin(which I also use & love) or Linn Kazoo. If you prefer you can run HQ Player on your computer platform of choice do digital EQ,etc and use the mR as a network audio adapter. If you've been a Squeezebox guy, you can run LMS(free) on the NAS or a computer and use the Squeezelite(free) app for control. 

One of the benefits is getting a full PC or Mac computer and its associated noise out of the listening room and galvanically isolated from the dac. While some would argue "the mR is a computer", that's true but it is a low power single purpose computer that doesn't have a bunch of extra processes running and its board is designed specifically to minimize noise getting passed to the dac.  Everybody who's heard it here had an eargasm. Cheers,
Spencer

I use a Squeezebox Touch with a Vortexbox Appliance from Small Green Computer. The Vortexbox is ~$425, and is a turn-key system that uses FLAC and is designed to work with Squeezebox. The sound is pretty good, and there is no USB connection in the signal chain. IMHO, coax digital is a simpler connection and getting good sound from USB requires a lot of effort that coax digital eliminates. I also bought dbPoweramp to rip CDs from my laptop, and it has a great file format converter, so you can convert your iTunes files to FLAC for the Vortexbox. If this interests you and you have any questions, let me know.  Also, Squeezebox Touch units on ebay are being sold for closer to $300 right now.