Does the HSX-109 implement the same protocol?

Yup. At least in terms of the way that the PC "Audio Receiver Manager" serves up the player software as an NFS thingy and responds to the HTTP requests to feed files to the player.


although it requires some additional stuff be run on another computer,

Unfortunately, that won't work for me because I leave all my computers off except for the HSX-109. The other computers are too noisy for 100 percent uptime.

What about the other third party players?