This has been a great conversation. I looked at my digital world and realized that it is mostly in boxes on 20+ hard drives..none of it audio. My whole digital life, my family, business ..now retired .. is all in boxes on random hard drives. So, I decided to consolidate, wipe all drives and dispose or sell them.
I just purchased a five bay Synology DS1522+/Four 16TB enterprise drives.. can add more later.. 32GB of Ram and 800GB of M.2 NVMe SSD cache. My external CD/DVD drive comes today and I will store all music on the NAS, as well as centralize 50,000+ Lightroom photos + years of family videos. So, I spent my CD transport money on a NAS.. rather a different outcome than I saw coming into this conversation. What I give up is being able to listen to a limited number SACD discs and what I will need to do is maximize my streamer. It is clear to me that with enough money, I could buy a CD transport that will outshine present day streaming, but I don’t believe that this difference will remain and streaming equipment will get better with time. Retirement involves projects, hobbies..a bit of travel and like always..obeying the almighty spouse.. The NAS is a project/hobby. Well, gotta go.. some power cables just arrived...Thanks for all the input...Gary