Firstly, I have to say that I agree with Ben, his experience mirrors mine. I have posted previously that I took a long expensive journey down the file based music rabbit hole, before finally, by chance trying a far cheaper transport that my server set up, which yielded significantly better results. There are people who swear that a good server setup is a superior solution, no read errors, buffered stream etc.(not to mention Hi Res files) but that was not my experience, CD transport was far more natural with huge soundstage depth.
Technical reason why? Mmm, my thoughts are that it is down to the increased electrical noise and the additional complexity of a server setup. I have said this before, but I think in time the server solution will surpass CD just not yet. You have processors, memory chips, SSD's, USB bus and drivers, the operating system software and the music playback software, they all make a difference. A CD transport, has one simple job with dedicated, purpose built circuitry that is way simpler and generates far less HF noise.
Be interested to hear what others say, as when you start to think about it technically, and consider how the CD transport has to read its bit stream, and compare that to the reliability of say a SSD on a server, you would assume that the server would be the superior solution. It was completely counter intuitive to me just how much better a CD transport was.