I have no experience with the IDA-16 to know whether its DAC is better than the internal DAC of the Bluesound, but can partially address your question regarding MQA playback. When using the analog audio outputs of the Bluesound Node 2 you will be getting full MQA decoding. The digital output of the Node 2 only supports MQA Core decoding (which is just the first unfold) so unless the external DAC being connected to supports MQA Rendering you will not be getting full MQA decoding. NuPrime doesn't appear to currently support MQA. That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll prefer the Bluesound DAC to that of the NuPrime, just that the NuPrime does not support MQA. If it's a superior DAC it may still outperform the Bluesound even without full MQA decoding. Wish it was simpler and I could tell you which would be best, but only you can determine that by listening to both connection schemes to determine which sounds best to you.
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