Music Streaming By iPad

Am I the only person who wonders why anyone would pay hi-fi prices for a streaming device when there are iPads?

More to the point, when there are spare iPads, or even a recent generation iPod, or an iOS 12 or later iPhone left over from an upgrade. I re-purposed an old 16GB Air after I upgraded to a later model with more storage. My only mini-gripe is speed of app loading. The response once loaded is just fine.

Music does not need state-of-art kit - video does. My music files (AAC or MP3, granted) are on a removable HDD, attached to a ten-year-old ASUS netbook running Windows 7 on a Celeron chip and connected by WiFi. The Stratospherix Music Streamer finds the HDD as a regular Windows drive, and scans the directories to create a catalogue with album art on the iPad. A rescan of my 1,000+ CDs takes about ten minutes at most.

Connect the iPad to your amplifier as follows:

Apple Camera Adapter with power pass-through. There's one for Lightning ports and one for USB-C ports. Connect the Lightning / USB-C pigtail to the iPad, and the cable from the transformer to the pass-through port. This will provide power without draining batteries. Connect to an external DAC or amplifier digital input using a USB-A to USB-(whatever the other end is) cable. If you don't have an external DAC or a super-integrated amplifier, you can use a Dragonfly or some other USB DAC, and connect its output to an analogue input on the amp.

Download whatever streaming or music apps you need onto the iPad - those apps are free, subscriptions for content may apply. I have the Sonos (don't judge me) app, Qobuz, and Stratospherix Music Streamer (that has a minimal cost). An iPad can handle Naxos and other services that don't play nice with Sonos and other streaming-controller-apps (from e.g. KEF or Naim). It can also be a Roon controller. Of course it can: it's a computer.

The path is digital all the way from the music server to the DAC, wherever that may be.

There are discussions about whether the hi-fi people can build a digital link between their wi-fi card / LAN port to their DAC which is audibly better than Apple's link in the iPad. I will leave that argument to more techie heads than mine.

Two things.

It has to be Apple, because Android re-samples everything to 16/48 (or near offer). Apple pretty much passes the digits through, so if you get 24/192 or whatever in through the wireless, that's what will go out of the Lightning / USB port.

And, this only works if you have an older iPad, a superceded iPhone with iOS12+, or a recent iPod, hanging around.

Otherwise cost becomes a factor. iPads are £400 or so, and those Camera Adapters are £40-80. If you don't have a DAC, a Dragonfly Black is around £100. iPods are less than £200 and have the same functionality but a smaller screen. (I started streaming using an iPod. Didn't notice a difference moving between the two.) Whereas the Bluesound Node is £399 at Richer Sounds, everyone says it's wonderful, and it has its own DAC so it plays nice with an analogue-only amplifier. And you do get 500 Audiophile Points if you have Bluesound Node. (I think there's a penalty for using Apple gear.)

Hence the qualification of my question: when there are spare iPads.