How old is too old for a Dac?

I know it’s ’sacrilege’ here on AG to suggest such a thing, but by way of a fun project that’s not too expensive and might deliver unexpectedly positive results, you might consider something like a Raspberry Pi and DAC daughter board, then rip your discs to FLAC using EAC.

I’m using a HiFiBerry and have been thrilled with the results, especially given the fact that I don’t think there’s a player/console in my budget that would be able to keep up with the rest of my system. All in, it was under $120 for the Pi3, HiFiBerry, case and power supply. As a point of reference, Bryston uses the HiFiBerry in their own DAC, so it can’t be all that bad.

If you decide to go this route, it would be interesting to hear the observations of you more experienced guys comparing the sound of this ’new’ technology to that of traditional ’high end’ products.

^ I’ve considered Raspberry Pi since it doesn’t cost much to try it out. Unfortunately my ears are far from educated with current tech. Combine this with the little amount of gear on hand to compare it with... I’m not sure how useful my assessment would be.

But yeah, so much of the cost of high end stuff is the cosmetics, and the profit for everyone in the supply chain.

you should go to http://www.computeraudiophile.com/ and ask there

a lot of equip. designers and serious audiophiles that specialize in DACs and streaming are there 

I see some discussion of newer DAC’s sounding better on redbook - I’ll just add that we did a comparison in my system of my Musical Fidelity A3.5 with a Schitt Modi 2 Uber and the CD player still sounded much better using its own dac than as a transport sending the digital out to the Schitt.

If it sounds good to you, than it is a good dac. 
I made the mistake of hearing an Audio Note DAC 3 Balanced and then nothing sounded good enough.