All you can do to find out for yourself is to do the equipment upgrade and then do the shootout in your home with the new gear and find out and the cost of doing the shootout will be nothing once the gear is in place.
This.
That was just an exaggeration. It was not meant to be taken literally.
With that being said, you can spend far less than $5k, probably even less than $1k to hear the difference between Apple music and the likes of Tidal and Qobuz.
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It depends how much you want to spend. But at your $5000 budget you could get the newly released today Kef LS50 Meta (Crutchfield has a 60 day trial) and one of the all in ones like the Strata, Uniti Atom, Hegel, etc. This would all likely be a very nice upgrade. At that point, you can try Tidal or Quboz and see if you think it’s worth the expense over Apple Music.
It’s impossible to quantify at exactly what dollar value of a system that low res sounds bad.
The Wharfdale Lintons (also Crutchfield) would be another speaker option, more forgiving than the KEF of low res Apple Music.
With the Strata, @jamesh will give you a sweet deal on a trade in of your old gear.
Depending on what you choose, you may have money left over for a REL sub. The amp and speaker combo will have the biggest effect on what you hear.
He has speakers and a sub he said he was happy with. But yes if he was in the market for speakers the Linton’s and their stands for $1500 are a real bargain. I have a pair in my office system and have found that if the room they are in is not big enough to give them real breathing room then a sub can be too much unless you plug the ports. Much like the big Harbeth’s and Spendor Classic series they like to be well out into a room. And they look like they cost thousands more than they do.
Just giving options depending on how “from scratch” he wishes to go. Such is the nature of the audiophile seductress, there’s always one more step 
Oh I understand but his PMC’s are actually a highly thought of monitor and to me preferable to LS-50’s of any type. The Linton’s are a different story but squeezing them in the wrong room could be a mess with bass boom.
Just to give context on Apple Music’s 320k bitrate vs lossless streaming was an old project called “The Ghost in the MP3” which was a subtractive process of taking the mp3 data out of the lossless file and playing back only the remaining.
Click here to see what you’re missing by only listening to 320k files:
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The LS50 Meta seems to be at a completely different level than the LS50…
Indeed, there is always one more step. Last night I compared Apple Music to Qobuz, as well as the different Qobuz formats and I could not discern any difference. Blind testing with the help of an assistant revealed the same. I have concluded that with my ears and on my amp/speakers, I either cannot tell the difference or my system is not enough to reveal a difference. So I will remain with Apple Music because one thing for certain is that IF there is a difference, it is minimal at best, again, on my system with my ears.
So now I will test whether or not the analog out on the Bravia is a weak point vs optical out to a DAC. I decided that before I spend the money on a quality DAC, I will confirm again that my system (amp/speakers) would benefit from it. I purchased an inexpensive passive preamp (schitt SYS) and DAC (Modius) and will take my Bravia’s optical out and run it through the DAC and do a blind test (Bravia’s analog out vs optical out DAC). If I can discern any improvement in sound, then I will purchase a high quality DAC/preamp combo. Thanks for all the help and responses. So many choices.
Bravia?
Are you saying your audio source is a TV? Even the world’s best DAC on the planet will sound just “okay” being fed a S/PDIF signal from a TV.
And what exactly is it about the TV that makes it’s optical conduit so poor in transferring data that it is incapable of benefitting from a good DAC? Is this another variation on the “if you have to ask” question? Another exaggeration?
Chops is assuming little attention has been paid to the handling of digital audio data within the TV, which is likely true.
However, my experience is one can get good sound from a television’s optical output - not the best, but quite good, and good enough to pay attention to the DAC one is using.
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The digital audio is stripped from the HDMI using an extractor and then converted to an optical signal. I would imagine that the chips which do both tasks are fairly standard. And even if there were “better” chips to extract and convert, I can’t imagine SONY not using them. These tasks are simple and fixed. There is no opportunity to add “color”. At this stage, everything is ones and zeros.
- Absolutely. The GDAC will be a much better fit if you’re going to be sticking with the NAD as the amp and using Apple Music as the source. I think the GDAC and the C268 will pair up quite nicely together, but I’m really going to recommend you move passed the Apple Music through Apple TV as your source. If this is going to be your casual listening / jukebox setup that you use for background music, Apple Music will more than suffice. But with you setting a 5K budget, I suspect you’re after a little more than a fancy background music rig.
You didn’t go through the entire testing procedure when you were A/B testing Apple Music vs Qobuz, but if it was through the same Apple TV setup, I’m not terribly surprised you didn’t hear much of a difference. Apple does A LOT of compression when doing anything with their hardware and software because (blanket statement coming) their customers care way more about speed / fluidity compared to sound quality / potential UI latency.
Long answer short, again, I think the GDAC and NAD will make for a sweet pairing, but we need to address the source. This is where the Strata would fit nicely. The DAC/preamp/amp sections in the Strata are really good and it also solves the source issue as well.
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Thanks James. I did my testing on a mac laptop. Are you saying that lossless streaming from Qobuz will not reveal any noticeable improvement in quality over 320k apple music if using an iphone or other apple hardware such as a mac? Aren’t a decent amount of Qobuz and Tidal customers using apple products/DACs?
Oh gotcha. The output from a phone will likely still be compressed, but the computer will be different. Depending how you have the audio settings configured in the computer, it should be decoding the files natively. Meaning it will actually be decoding the Qobuz files at or above 44.1/16. So yes, you are exactly right. The computer will behave differently from Apple TV, phone, etc…
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Hey there James, no need to respond. A quick look at the issue online reveals how complicated the issue is and indeed that apple brings more than a few obstacles when playing back hi-res files. Perhaps this is why all my testing going back now 5 years has never revealed any improvement.
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And the mac cannot handle 24bit/192khz (only 24 bit/96khz) which is where, according to this 2014 study below, real differences in sound quality can be heard
So you are correct that it won’t be really possible to test on the apple platform.
I’d suggest rather than breaking it all down into small pieces to test in order to anticipate whether or not a yet to be acquired DAC/ whatever will potentially help, to instead simply do a home audition of something like the Strata or Uniti Atom, or Stellar or whatever strikes your fancy. To see how the new gear compares to your current system.
The Mac can be a good source, it’s what Paul McGowan uses. And it can handle high resolution Audio well into the upper PCM and DSD ranges.
But the Bravia is not going to be a great source when compared to other audiophile options.
I just think you aren’t going to know if you like the water temperature until you go ahead and dive in. Between PS Audio, Music Direct or Crutchfield, you can have a healthy home trial. And then if the new gear doesn’t best your Bravia, so be it, we will lay our audiophile doctrine down in defeat 
I think those are wise words. I assume that Paul is not using the Mac mini’s DAC and is only using it as a music server and probably not streaming Apple music, right? Do you know many audiophile setups that have Apple Music as the audio file music source?