Another streaming newbie

At the risk of sounding like captain obvious, there's a less traveled option with increased mobility but it does have some sound quality limitations on your home hifi

Since you've already connected your iphone to your preamp, you're in essence using your iphone as the streamer

Look into the low cost USB attached DACs that will work with your iphone

I use the AudioQuest Dragonfly, $300 and it will achieve bit perfect playback

You can come out of the Dragonfly wired into headphones, your car stereo or your home  preamp

The headphone is handy for comparing and testing the different streaming file formats

It transformed the sound in my car.  I stream Tidal via cell service played through the Dragonfly that's attached AUX to the car stereo

Everyone thinks I got a new system in my car

Lots of little gymnastics to get to full MQA rendering and playback but pretty sweet once you connect all the dots

It took 6 months but the streaming convenience eventually pushed me over the edge to upgrade my primary home system

Primary drivers were the sound quality of the hi-res streaming formats and the convenience of changing out the music from a chair using a handheld device

I added a PS Audio DSD with the network bridge and cabled it to my internet router. Built a Roon server on a PC using an iphone as the content end point and user interface, subscribed to Tidal and QoBuz for content

I sit in my listening chair with 35 million songs at my fingertips using the  iphone to select content

Sound quality is exceptional, the convenience of changing content from the hand held device is fantastic and I haven't bought a CD or album since converting

The new releases come out on Tidal and QoBuz

Needless to say, I'm finally a streaming convert

Hope this helps

The player has Ethernet cable in, but how do controller/player talk?

Your  iPad and surface are on the same network as the player(whichever one you choose). You download an app, for instance on the iPad if you use Node2i you go to app store and download bluOS it finds the Node2i on the network which you use to control it. 

Do you mind explaining this one a bit more?  I don't think the analog analogy is the best one to use here since we are talking digital and ones and zeros.  The reason a high end cdp cost so much mostly the dac, you can only do so much with the rest of the internals to improve sound-wise.  

Using a great UI with proper connections with an upgraded DAC doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as you are suggesting but if it is I would like to know why.

It's a pretty easy to understand analogy isn't it?  How about trying to build something on a less than great foundation?  Does that make more sense to you?

I'm not saying the Bluesound is bad, far from it.  For its price it's a wonderful product and delivers very good sound quality.  Nor did I say that adding a good DAC to it is "bad".  It's not.  There's just a better way to about getting better sound from streaming, which is what you're after if you're going to add a DAC to a device that already has one, right?

Go read the other "streaming newbie" thread that spun off this one.  You'll see that a lot of people have done that and see little to no improvement in sound quality.

Upgrading to a better streamer/DAC (the TEAC NT-505) resulted in a much greater improvement in sound quality, not to mention soundstage, than adding a $3500 DAC to the Bluesound. 

I don't know the exact "why" of it, since as you said, "it's just ones and zeros", but I know what I heard.  Spending less than $2K plus recovering a few hundred from the sale of my Node 2 was also a better deal from a cost/performance standpoint than buying a Bluesound and an external DAC.

@chuckccs I started out with the Node 2 because I wanted to dip my toes into streaming and see if I liked it.  I also got a good deal on the Node 2 because the Node 2i had just come out and ended up getting most of my money back on the Bluesound when I replaced it.  That's not a bad way to start, but if sound quality matters, you'll probably end up doing an upgrade at some point. 

It sounds like you've already embraced the world of opportunity that streaming will open up to you, so my advice would be to make an investment that you'll be happy with right away.

PS: this is so much fun to talk about and learn. Midnight last night I’m reading schematics and discussions by engineers re diy dac’s - totally over my head on a good day, but bleary-eyed at midnight... ha. 
I am getting such a great education from you guys. It feels like most of the options that are in the ball park of my needs are on the table. At least in theory I have a clue, see mainly what the major pieces are and how they fit. But sound is so subjective. Just no way to know till you plug it in and play it in my system.