How old is too old for a Dac?

^ 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.

Dedicated CD transport without inner DAC will always sounds better that regular CD player when connected to the same DAC.From my personal experience regular CD players aren’t so good as transport.A dedicated CD transport doesn’t have analog circle and no inner DAC so capable to transfer a pure digital data to the DAC .

I agree that the newer DACs today are so good that there is almost no difference between red book CDs and "hi-res" .