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...
Most MP3's are 44khz (sample rate) and 16bit (bith dept). Where they differ from CD is the bitrate: 1,411.2 kbit/s for 44/16 uncompressed audio down to max 320 kbit/s for MP3.