If you want to get the most out of your older high end system with today's technology, then use the best of today's technology to feed a good signal to your gear. Lossy compressed streaming music isn't the only option. Get (or repurpose) a laptop and portable USB hard drive and rip CDs to it in a lossless format. Then get an inexpensive but highly effective 3rd party playback software package. For Windows there's J River Media and several others. For Mac I use Audirvana Plus and recommend it highly.
Rip all your CDs. Put them on the portable hard drive so it doesn't max out the internal drive. Then go to the library or pawnshops to get cheap (or free) sources of CDs and rip them as well. Visit HDTracks and download some 24-bit files sampled at 88.2 or 96 Khz in a lossless format.
Configure the 3rd party software for "Hog Mode," in which the playback s/w overrides backups, email, etc. to maximize resources for decoding and playback. Many of these systems enable you to specify a certain amount of RAM to buffer the digital stream. This is paramount to reducing jitter and getting the smoothest, most relaxing presentation.
It may sound a little complicated at first, but the software is inexpensive and highly configurable to get the most music out of your bits. I'm listening to a 24/96 HDTracks download of Bill Evans' "Waltz for Debby" as I write this and it's luscious.
