Wanting to upgrade my streaming sound quality.

I have been primarily an analog guy for fifty years. Wishing and being disappointed by digital. Finally over the last couple years I was able to do it. It is not likely to be cheap. You can see my system under my ID.

My best bet for you to accomplish what you want would be sure to make sure you have the best DAC that MAC makes and then pair it with a first rate streamer… you might start by trying a Aurender N100 ($4K)… I am not sure of the SQ of your analog end. I recommend Aurender for a serious attempt at duplicating analog’s high sound quality. I have there flagship the W20SE and that is what it took to get there. Linn also makes great high end streamers. You need both high end streamer and DAC.

In my system most components ended up costing roughly in the same ballpark. My analog end cost about $35K (TT + Phono stage) and digital ~ $40K (streamer + DAC). Obviously that is only a generalization on how to look at this. But I have tried a few high end DACs and Streamers and they are competitively priced on sound quality. Unlike the lower end where there is much more variation in price / sound quality. I would imagine scaling these numbers to fit you system might not be helpful in thinking about what it might take. It can be expensive trying to go too cheap over and over again.

Good luck, it is amazing when you get there. But no less work and money than putting together a great analog end.

imho it is mostly about the dac, but the front end signal feed through the streamer often matters too, especially for higher resolution systems reaching for a very high level of s.q. ...

Ghd, your system, I’m sure is amazing, however I’m not going to spend that kind of money. My whole system is only about 30k retail. I’m really looking for something that would be a noticeable improvement from the dac in my c47 and the iPad. I’ve looked at numerous threads on here about digital streaming sq and feel sure I should be able to make improvements for a lot less than 30k. 
Would hooking up my preamp directly to my modem with an Ethernet cable improve the sound? Everything I read says that the dac in my c47 is not great and I can’t go to the Mac dac2 upgrade. Would a streamer fed into the dac on the c47 improve things?

OP, I was not in any way suggesting you spend $30K. What I was suggesting that in order to get to the same performance level it is likely you will have to spend something on the order of cost of your other components. Hence I suggested maybe a Aurender N100 might be appropriate… actually it is $2.7K.. not $4 like I said.

Happy hunting.

Well, here’s what I’d do — get an iFi Zen Stream with their upgraded linear power supply (yeah I know, but it makes a big difference at relatively low cost), and since you’re an analog guy I’d recommend a good R2R DAC like a Denafrips Pontus ll.  Beyond the scope of this thread, at some point I’d add an optical connection between your router and DAC, which can be done for only about 80 bucks.  And go with Qobuz, NOT Tidal with their silly MQA BS.  Best of luck.