Hi Nico,
Welcome to the forum! I started my own dCS journey with a Verdi/Purcell/Elgar/Verona stack 24 years ago. Fantastic system, I’m delighted to hear it’s still bringing you listening pleasure.
Whether a local server attached over an ethernet network is “by far, the best” only you can judge. It is a simple and relatively low cost solution which should give you excellent sound quality.
In that case you would need:
- A dCS Network Bridge (this uses the same network board as the Lina/Bartók/Rossini/Vivaldi, so although it is no longer in production it still receives network board updates (most recently last November) alongside those others which are.
- A PC/Mac running Windows, MacOS or Linux. The most minimal solution is an ASUS NUC as described in this thread. If you install DietPi (a Linux variant) on your NUC you could run either MinimServer (UPnP), Roon Server or both. You could store your files locally if you install a large enough SSD, or access a NAS if you want that flexibility.
All this, as well as some of the pros and cons (the above is a potentially good value solution but requires some basic computer skills) is discussed in this recent thread (particularly this post of mine towards the end).
One thing to point out however is that your Purcell only has one single- and your Elgar Plus only one pair of dual-AES inputs so if your Verdi is connected with AES, regardless of whether you plug the NWB into the DAC or the Upsampler (I assume you would prefer the latter to be able to upsample to DSD) you will either not be able to play SACDs or you will need to cable-swap. You have a similar situation with clock cables as each unit only has one Word Clock output, swapping would be required between the Verdi and the NWB. Unless you use the 1394 connection for the Verdi I can’t see a way around these. If you don’t need support for higher resolutions than 24/44.1 or 24/88 from the NWB then you could connect that to the Purcell with RCA which would solve the signal path problem, but not the Word Clock one.
Audio-specific music servers are also an option, generally they offer configuration and usability benefits, and solutions are available at a huge range of price points. However many of these are optimized around USB outputs, which your Purcell and Elgar Plus lack, so watch out for that. If connected via AES (e.g. Aurender) the aforementioned constraints unfortunately still apply.