Flaws in this chain?

Listener fatigue. Ever experience it? Excessive jitter was the culprit for me a number of years ago. Since that time I’ve paid close attention to eliminating it as much as possible. Never again experienced listener fatigue in my home. DACs have come a long way, yes, but feeding a DAC a low jitter stream can help performance. IMO of course.

That's good to feed a low jitter stream but modern DAC's don't use the embedded clocking information from the incoming stream they use removal systems to isolate it from the reconstruction clock in the converter. If you can hear jitter and it bothers you then use whatever you need or want to me I don't hear it so I don't worry about it. 

I am no expert by a LONG shot which is why I try to read as much as possible from those who are. I could be wrong and would be the first to admit it but the way I understand it is the digital stream , the 1’s and 0’s, are sent to the DAC that converts to analog, as long as those 1’s and 0’s get there the DAC reconstructs them using it’s clock since the embedded clock information and any jitter that was sent in the stream has been isolated out. If the 1's and 0's don't get there you have a bigger problem than jitter and it's pretty easy to hear if the information does not arrive. 

All that I can say is that using the chain I described in the OP above, the SQ is not particularly good...but it is with basic iTunes files....which don't sound too good to me most of the time anyway.

I have not compared a hi-res ripped CD through the ATV vs direct connect to the computer. 

Probably won't bother as I'm finding I can preview stuff okay via the ATV when I'm lazy. If/when I go to hi-res Tidal I will experiment some more.

So, Macbook Tidal  > wireless> ATV> DAC> preamp sounds kind of lousy and itunes the same chain sounds better?  My guess is it's tidal but I never used tidal so have no direct knowledge. Can tidal be installed on the ATV ?  I use an integrated amp/dac/streamer so I might not be the best for ideas but it looks like a lot of nodes involved. To me even ripped CD on my  NAS wireless to my integrated  doesn't quite have the SQ as CDP digital to the integrated but it's close, blind I might not be able to tell. So far I have only listened to internet radio over my integrated which isn't bad for casual been waiting on Qobuz to try hi - res streaming.