Better DAC or better Streamer

No matter what you upgrade, DAC or streamer, you will get an improvement in sound quality. However in your case @eddy1 you will have a bottleneck in your streamer and you will be upgrading it soon after. The SP2000 is similar to streaming with iPad - there’s plenty of room for improvement there. 

How close is Hugo TT2 with Mscaler to the sound of DAVE?

Are you looking to continue using Mscaler with DAVE or are you giving up the Chord combo to move up to DAVE and planning on using the DAVE without Mscaler?

If you plan on running DAVE by itself then I would probably say get a proper streamer and keep your TT2/Mscaler combo.

If your upgrade is DAVE/Mscaler combo then probably go that route and add a streamer later.

@mikhailark Chord DAC/Mscaler stack expects a digital signal it can understand. There’s no built in network renderer. 
The streaming gizmo OP is using processes the data it received via Ethernet, converts it to the format a DAC would understand according to its specified bit rate and the rest happens inside the DAC. 
Depends on the type of interface used between the streamer and DAC, the data will either be clocked by the streamer (spdif out) or by the DAC (USB). and that’s just part of the processing chain.
If you believe there’s no jitter anywhere in that interface you should probably not provide anymore thoughts on the subject until you do your research. 
 

So…in the digital source setup everything matters starting from the Ethernet cable that feeds your streamer, to the rendering and processing to analog stage and output.

While you’re right that the DAC will bring an improvement, a better streamer would too. There is a different degree of improvement but it’s an improvement nonetheless. 

@mikhailark I see. Best of luck to you. 

@mclinnguy you and I both