Where should I go from here with my digital front end?

As others have mentioned, get a switch with its own clock, an LPS for your U2, experiment with the fiber optic route or an ENO filter, better cables, and of course a better DAC eventually. IME every step in the digital chain counts, and ignore the "its just 0 and 1s" trolls.

Does not matter what you do.  You will not be able to improve the sound quality sourcing through Tidal or Qobuz.  The signal is full of jitter from upstream connections.  Once that jitter is introduced, there is no way it can be changed or removed.  Best place to start is with your own local files PCM or DSD.  Put together a collection of your favorite music on a local disk … you can use Tidal or Qobuz for discovery.  Once you have this ‘local’ music collection in place you can revisit the hardware again.  Trying to improve the sound quality of Tidal and Qobuz is a fools errand.

.....To Analogue for better sound quality :-) !!!

@chilli42 

The signal is full of jitter from upstream connections.  Once that jitter is introduced, there is no way it can be changed or removed.

Which "upstream" connections are you referring to?

Regards,

barts

Barts,

There really is nothing you can do to eliminate jitter from the media provider companies as their signal pass through multiple computer servers and switches before it make it into your house.  Unless you have a dedicated trunk from the Tidal servers there really will never be a clean signal from them.