Have a Project Debut Carbon Evo paired with a used Musical Fidelity V90 LPS phono stage. Biggest upgrade was getting a cheap stylus force gauge and upgrading the cartridge to an Audio-Technica VM540ML, which solved the inner groove distortion problem. Happy with the sound now for around 900 Euro.
They only had a few items on Amazon.nl in April last year. They listed the 8300CDQ for €890 while other shops asked 1200>1500 for it. But since they are on the Audiolab distributors list I took the plunge and it turned out okay.
Maybe you should give JRiver Media Center a try. I run it on a Pi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS to serve Apple Lossless to my Apple stuff, DLNA devices and a Pi running Moode, controlled with their JRemote app.
It also has video capabilities but I never tried those.
Core Audio is the audio layer of OS X so you can't bypass it.
What you can bypass is the system mixer which down/upsamples everything to the samplerate set in audio/MIDI Config.
Vox (like most players) has a setting for that called Exclusive Access. This allows the player to send audio in the...