I am very curious about an outcome of your Aurender vs Antipodes battle.
Just recently I've had a chance to compare Lampizator Superkomputer to DX Gen 2. In the end, Antipodes won, but not by a large margin, mainly due its lower noise floor and ease of use.
I had been listening to the Superkomputer for several weeks before my Antipodes arrived. When I first switched it on after the Lampizator, it sounded really awful. On the third day it became listenable and after 5 days it's sound was comparable to the Lampizator. And only after 7 days of almost uninterrupted playback it surpassed the Superkomputer.
Also, make sure, that you use Roon as apparently it sounds better than any other playback engine.
And, for critical listening in Roon it is important to disable all the background tasks it performs or wait for them to finish. Below is an extract from the Roon knowledge base on how to do it.
"Here's a bunch of ideas. Some are things to control for. Some are other troubleshooting techniques.
(1) In settings -> services, look "Syncing library now" + wait for it to finish:
(2) In settings -> storage, look for "Scanning now..." + wait for it to finish:
(3) In settings -> setup, disable both analysis settings.
(4) The spinner in the upper right covers importing and metadata lookups. Wait for that to finish, too."
And one last thing, when you switch between Aurender and Antipodes, you need to keep the Antipodes powered on at all times. Otherwise, the capacitors inside it are discharged and it affects the sound. What I did, I had another plugged in power cord near my rack and used it to keep the Antipodes powered on even when I was listening to the Lampizator.
Good luck and happy listening!
Aziz