I think that CDs best streaming from Qobuz. Not that Qobuz is bad, but in my system there is a hair breadth of difference. You will see claims both ways, but frequently people are not comparing comparable components, perhaps a $300 CDP vs a $10K streamer or vice versa. In my 2 channel system, using the same DAC, I find streaming my burned CDs from my NAS and playing CDs are nearly comparable, and streaming Qobuz through the same streamers (Melco N100 and Cambridge Audio CXN 60) just that slightly audible fall off, with a higher noise floor and less sharply painted tones. Perhaps an Uber expensive streamer would reveal Qobuz in a more favorable light.
In your case the first obvious issues are the sources. You can do worse than Apple mobile devices but they were never intended to be high end music players. Secondly I do think wired is better. I would also invest in a dedicated streamer. Which one depends on your budget and desired features.
Playing CDs sounds better than Qobuz — dammit
I’ve built a decent HeadFi rig over the past few months and am quite happy with it streaming Qobuz as a source via my iPad/iPhone. I recently brought my CD player into the rig as there are some reference CDs I need that aren’t available on Qobuz. Well, I made the mistake of playing some CDs and compared them to Qobuz, and in every case the CD sounds better — specifically a quieter background and more transparency overall. I’ve got good cables from the dongle out of my iPad to the USB cable that runs to my DAC for streaming, so let’s leave cables out of the discussion for now because I think this goes deeper than that. Needless to say I’m pretty disappointed right now because I’ve enjoyed not spinning discs over the past year or so and certainly don’t wanna go back to buying CDs again. Ugh.
So, what I’m thinking is that streaming over WiFi through my iDevices may be the bottleneck. IF that’s the case and I need to up my streaming game, what would be the cheapest way to go to overcome the bottleneck? My thought is going hardwired (which I can do) to something like an iFi Stream or maybe a ProJect Streambox, but just wondering if that’d get it done? Something else? I need something pre-made and won’t wrestle with doing a Raspberry Pi with hats, etc. as I have no patience for configuring/troubleshooting tech. Thanks for any advice/thoughts.