Please help!

I'm looking to upgrade my exisitng set up (Meridian 206B delta CD Player, CyrusII+PSX and Meridian Argent A2 - passive speakers) and fancy keeping the A2s and getting some used 500 series kit as I don't have the funds to buy a new Merdian system.

I can see the future is to stream music and would like to base the sytem around this as a source. At present, I've been using Apple airplay and would prefer keeping this but have heard it only supports or downsamples to 44.1KHz 16 Bits and id be better off usig a logitech sqeeze box or similar which supports 96 kHz 24Bits connected to an external DAC. To be honest i dont know / understand if i need this higher quality as i'll be ripping CDs and downloading music which i guess means most will be 16 bit format anyway?

My initial research points me in the direction of a 501 + 556 or the more expensive 502 + 557. I would like to use a 500 series DAC but im not sure if any would support 96 kHz, 24 Bits....

Would i be better off buying a new, non-Meridian DAC and connecting to an analgoue Meridian pre+power or is there a Meridian DAC or digital pre-amp / processor that would give me better results? I dont want to switch video through the system so guess a digitial processor like the 565? wouldn't be a good option......

Any suggestions much appreaciated!

Tristan