I am not that knowledgeable about servers. However to the best of my understanding, you have to chose one sound card or the other for output. That makes it impossible to output high-rez digital concurrently with HDMI because the Lynx card does not have HDMI. I plan to send digital out from the Vanity card to my dac while transmitting via HDMI for the remaining channels to my surround processor. Jriver can transmit 7.1 with JRSS from a 5.1 SACD sound track via HDMI. The Vanity card can not. In order to use the DSD processing, you have to turn HDMI off. You are then limited to 5.1 of digital solely from the Vanity card. That is another reason the DSD processing would not work for me. It would stop my from being able to concurrently transmit over HDMI. I already have all of the SACD's I intend to ever rip, ripped. However it seems very time consuming to have to rip every Blu-ray and I'm still not sure how to do that with a lossless sound track and video? Will Jriver even do that? I would prefer to use DD Prologic 2x for movies instead of Jriver surround which I know very little about. It's just easier to be able to simply play a blu-ray through the Oppo than to have to rip every one. And yes, I've checked with both versions of the card. This will work and all channels will be in sync.
Sounds like a workable approach. My only comment would be it strikes me as a bit of a hassle just for the benefit of getting better FL/FR from Bly Ray discs. If this were for movies only I would not bother, but music videos with lots of content on the main channel will definitely benefit. Thenagain, for a $225 mod, there is very little downside.