Well, yesterday I picked up a Marantz M-CR603 that I had bought on eBay for not very much money. I've spent the last couple of hours trying to get the network player to work with my mac, and learning a little more than I did about DLNA servers. It might be an old system (and sadly, the original owner didn't update it to include some of the aftermarket features (and it's no longer supported)), but it still sounds very good.
@feloneouscat: happily, I found something free that will serve at least some of my needs, without being something that requires real technical knowledge - though I can't quite believe that the system's manuals give no real clue as to how to set up and use the thing aside from saying that it requires Windows Media Player 10. Such a short-sighted bit of manufacturing!
Yeah… as I said, many implementations are horrendously flawed. I abandoned DLNA years ago.
@feloneouscat I'll bear all that in mind when I'm next looking for a system - this one was a downsizing replacement, and I have strangely mixed feelings about not running pure separates! The sound is definitely very different from my last set-up. Punchier, but much less ... air.
@andrewcusworth
I have found DLNA to be frequently improperly implemented (there are, sadly, many standards that appear easy but frequently are not). As such I avoid it now (I wasted far too many hours debugging bad designs).