Synology Audio Station as CP - too optomistic?

[Beatsper]

Hi Everyone (newby!) (groan! I know!)
I must admit I'm enjoying the possibilities of minimstreamer.
My set up is Synology DS216play with direct USB connection to a Chord 2Qute DAC (which DSM recognises) and using Audio Station/DSaudio app as control points.
Thing is, as I ask minimstreamer to perform more demanding transcodes etc., Audio Station is finding it hard to cope - particularly with internet radio.
Now support at Synology tell me that my DAC is not one of their supported ones. I've noticed that, particularly with the HLS BBC streams, there is an occasional 'jump' in the sound like a record skipping.
HOWEVER, if I transcode the AAC streams to WAV and a sample rate of, say 384000hz (for a laugh - the DAC can cope with this), and then listen to this is a playlist item in Audio Station (via minimstreamer media server) it works intermittently: the DAC shows the correct colour for 384khz and the sound is sweeter and there are no skips/breaks in the sound!
Trouble is, it is all a little unstable. If I set up a number of radio stations in a playlist pointing at the minimstreamer radio streams - it's all a bit flaky - can even crash the NAS with it sometimes.
Anyone out there with any similar experiences/solutions? Or should I just get a hardware renderer - will it sound better anyway? And anyway there's no gapless playback with audio station via media server n'est pas?
Are there any other software NAS based renderers that would connect to my DAC straight out of the NAS?