Just to add another success story to your list. I was able to use an old BDP-S390 to perform the server duties, and once I understood the process, everything ran like a charm. The ethernet connection on this unit did not appear to work, so I used the Wi-Fi instead but I did not have any problems doing it this way. I was able to achieve speeds of up to 2.25 MB/sec. I used the 'Super Audio CD Decoder' plug-in for Foobar 2000 to convert the created DSF files directly to FLAC at 88.2/24 resolution - a simple process. To correct and improve some of the tags I ran mp3tag on the FLAC files. Nothing to it!
A few points about the S390:
This is an old machine and if you need to connect using the Wi-Fi it's not quite as easy as newer ones. It doesn't have auto-discovery of available networks, so you need to type in the network ID yourself. This was a little problematic because it won't accept a network ID with a hyphen in the name. All but one of mine do, so I was forced to use that one specific network, which was not my first choice. But it all worked regardless.
I logged in to my router to look for the IP address allocated to the S390 unit. It was there, but showed as 'unknown', which is not very helpful. I verified the IP address by moving temporarily to a location with access to a TV screen.
This unit only has one USB port, which is on the front. I was able to use it without any problems.
Overall, I would recommend using a newer model than the S390, but I'm happy to be able to say that the procedure described in this thread worked without any problems at all. Thanks to everyone involved in putting it together!