Looking for a good DAC under $500

My Node2 is about 1.5 yrs. in my system. At that time I bought the Cambridge CXN and the Node since those were two I narrowed down to in my price range. After about a week both myself and my Golden Eared wife agreed that the we preferred the Node2. Both are excellent for the money and our choice was made for multiple reasons. The ouverall sound was the most important.

I have had my Node2 for almost two years and really enjoy using it. I also bought a DacMagic Plus a few months ago mostly for use with my ancient CDP. As an experiment I compared the analog output of the BSN2 with its coax digital output through the DAC. Keeping everything the same - using the same preamp to keep the volume the same, I honestly could not tell the difference between the analog output from the Node2 and the output from the DAC. Now since this DAC does not support MQA, I thought may be there'll a difference if I play some MQA material and low and behold I still couldn't hear a difference. Both outputs sounded equally better with the MQA content - DAC showing 96Khz. That was until I decided to replace the DAC's wall wart with a linear power supply and now I think the DAC sounds a little better than the Node2 analog output and that's how I have been running it for the past couple of months. Of course using different interconnects for analog and/or digital might make a difference in some systems but in my system, using moderately priced cables,  the DacMagic Plus only made a positive difference after adding the LPS. Not night and day but audible nonetheless. Just as aside, the reason I bought this particular DAC aside from my limited budget, was for its dual digital coax inputs which now allows me to use both my CDP and Node2 through it. The improvement in the Redbook CD SQ alone was worth its moderate cost. I remember a member had also reported some improvement in Node2 by running it through a Bryston BDA1 DAC which I also considered for its dual coax input but wasn't able to find one used within my budget. Hope this helped. 

Shirt, parasound, IFI , all make good budget DACs 

I have the BS Node 2. I dougt you’ll find anything better than the built in dac for the $$$ you want to spend. Maybe the $799 Oppo Sonica

I agree that at the $500 stated budget the internal BSN2 DAC is likely to be as good. Now, use of an older used DAC having a more robust power supply and better analog output stage, such as the aforementioned Bryston BDA-1 which could be had for $750, would likely make for an improvement.