Being completely up front - I'm biased. I don't care for the Apple world at all. Great products - I'm not knocking the quality, but I don't like being restricted by their "walled garden" approach to everything. I'm a firm believer in a free market, open architecture for innovation and ultimately competitive pricing for us, the consumers.
So obviously I'm PC and Android based. I could go all geeky and go Linux based, but I see no need for that right now.
What being open means, is that some genius OCD kid in Japan who a prodigy in programming can whip up a great audiophile software like Bug Head
http://oryaaaaa.world.coocan.jp/bughead/index.htmlOr multiple people/groups can contribute to something completely open architecture like Foobar2000, which is really powerful but a bit techy.
http://www.foobar2000.org/Then the small programmers could come up with something so good they go big like Roon, or JRiver, or HQPlayer.
There are lots of options with Windows, because it's open to anyone who puts forth the effort to innovate.
Now, *you* need to decide what you need, and how much you're willing to put forth in effort or $$.
For example, Foobar2000 is powerful, heavily configurable, and "bit perfect".
It's FREE, but it's very fiddly to get setup correctly. It took me a couple hours to get it working, then a couple weeks to tweak all the settings and get it sounding the best it possibly good. Once setup, I didn't do a damn thing to it for two years - Rock solid. But there were lots of parts to getting it working, and lots of tweaking. If you're tweek inclined, have time, and no money - it's awesome! LOL
But today, I don't have the time to tweak, I really wanted to get great sound quick, and wanted to control it from my Android and not have to open up a laptop every time like I did with Foobar2000 (Note: I could do Foobar with my Android phone, but it was another layer of fiddly I just wasn't in the mood for). So I dropped the $115 for a year subscription to Roon. It's *not* an online streaming system like Tidal; it instead manages and provides metadata (and more!) for your existing music collection - and took me about 15 minutes to setup on *both* my computer and my andoid!! So that $115 gets me quick and easy setup, decent controls, and info like reviews and similar artists and other projects the artist has worked on! It's helped me discover great music I already had, and helped me seek out new stuff I didn't realize was out there. And it pushes my music over my network to my DirectSteam, my Denon Home Theater Receiver (networked), and any computer or phone...though that last part hasn't proven to be useful to me yet. LOL But I hate yearly subscriptions...ugh - I'm too broke for this.
That said, when things settle down a bit for me, I'm going to try some other software like the Bug Head mentioned above, and HQPlayer which is a DSD upsampling software like the OSX stuff you mentioned that Palomino uses...and HQPlayer also integrates with Roon, so that works out.
You could even go straight up hardware solutions that are basically networked DACs that have some sort of interface you can control with your phone like the AURALiC Aries.
http://www.audiostream.com/category/players-streamer-reviewsSorry that was so long - it's just, your question is like saying "what kind of car should I buy". There are a lot of "it depends". So I had to give you a broad overview of what's out there to help you narrow down what you have and what you need.
IMHO - if you have a DAC with a network connection, I'd just be jumping into some playback software with a demo period like Roon or JRiver. I'm sure there are more out there, I've just not taken the time to make a list or try them all.
If you have a DAC that's USB only and you're really happy with it, you either need a PC next to it, or you drop $700 on the microRendu which is basically a high quality Network to USB adapter, that also buffers the bits to improve sound. *then* you go through trying out some software mentioned above.
If you have no money, or love tweaking, then try out FooBar2000. There are guides out there to help you set it up. And it can work either via USB or over the network.
This is all basically what I wanted to post in the Digital forum. I'll probably cut and paste it there, and flesh it out a bit more when I have time. But work calls, and work pays the bills...