More money toward better speakers or a better DAC?

A low cost DAC these days ($1500 - $3000) is of incredible quality. Even reviewers of $15K+ DACs are saying this in their reviews, such as in a Bartok DAC review I just read (and others such as Jeff Fritz of SoundstageUltra.com).

If you have speakers that are pretty good and you generally like them I would spend my money on room treatments and/or Digital Room Correction. If you are a ROON or JRiver user then DRC is available to you.

I have KEF LS50s in a bad room. I will update these very soon but before I did that I got room treatments from GIK Acoustics and the LS50’s sounded amazing afterwards.

When I get my larger speakers into this bad room I will get Acoustic Sounds in Canada to remotely work with me to create DRC Convolution file(s) that I will plug into my ROON server. This will tailor my sound curve in the bass region to fit my room. It will be digital room treatments on steroids. The GIK treatments and the DRC will have the biggest impact vs more expensive DACs.

+1, @siox.
@emergingsoul,

“what is special about a tube dac, unless it helps with treble/vocal sounds similar to a tube amp”

The few designers that uses tubes in the output stage believes that tubes yields to a sound that offers slightly more rich harmonics, dense timbres/tonality, liquidity and three-dimensional imaging than DACs that are based on strictly solid-state circuits.

IME, majority of the budget priced DAC’s sound processed, unnatural and un-involving and this is particularly true of many of the new generation hi-resolution delta-sigma DAC’s. They may not lack transparency and micro-details, but they have a tendency to sound thin, clinical and washed-out when it comes to textural weight and the complexity of timbres and tonality.

Whether to consider, DAC’s with tubes in the output stage or not is comes down to one’s personal preferences and rest of the system. But more importantly regardless of what type of chip used in a DAC, the majority of the performance of each DAC relies heavily on the quality of its power supply, analog conversation circuit, overall internal parts and build quality.

I am in a camp where everything matters. As others have pointed out, address the room acoustics before you shell out money for speakers or electronics.

To @mesch point, here is another recommendation to consider,

http://www.borderpatrol.net/DAC.htm

Or this,  https://www.aquahifi.com/la_scala.html

JA tells you all you need to know about Borfer Patrol. 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/borderpatrol-digital-analogue-converter-se-measurements

Your question it seems to me is if you have money to spend where best to use it, speakers or DAC? This is an easy decision speakers by a mile.