Point of diminishing return for a DAC

i was lucky enough to find a great dealer (Basil Audio) that gave me a stack of Players to audition on my system in my house. I tried them all and while each had a great sound there was one that worked best for me. I blind tested them all again for my wife and she picked the same player I did. These were not low end players but each sounded different. I went with the Linn Akurate with Katalyst  and could not be happier. Take the time and find what is right for you and your equipment and room. 

I went with Benchmark for accuracy, neutrality and solid engineering, but I'm getting interested in Denafrips for musicality...not sure which models are significantly more musical than Aries2.  Any experience?Thx for Rendu tip.

If you have money to burn, pay over $1,000 for a any new DAC.
Not that SQ won't get better when more $ are thrown its way
but this technology is improving like crazy. 

Once again millercarbon pollutes another thread with his constant shilling of Synergistic Research snake oil.  Please stop!

You can do much better by spending more than $2500 for a dac. $2500 buys you a mid-fi dac. The best dacs are of the FPGA type which costs more and you get upgrades that improve the SQ 1 or 2 times a year for free. Also, the better dacs have Ethernet network connections.
Also, you don’t need a dedicated music server for a number of reasons:
1: you don’t want any kind of server in your audio room
2: you don’t want to use USB to any dac, it is a flawed connection

your Mac mini is fine running Roon, just place the server in a different room and connect to your dac by Ethernet, keep it simple and provides the best SQ