Wanting to upgrade my streaming sound quality.

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. 

There’s a used N100 on eBay asking under $1800. I like to buy high-quality stuff used. If you could find a used Ayre QB-9 Twenty, that’d be a fine DAC to present balanced input to your MAC preamp.

It’s Roon and Qobuz for me, I rarely spin anything on my TD124, a handsome icon.

db