10K is a healthy amount of samolians to heave at this issue. Still, I recommend being cost effective, in case you want to upgrade.
As indicated earlier I would buy a great DAC and start with a budget streamer, possibly even a PC. With that budget I would do something much better than the Chord. So ask yourself what features you want in a DAC. I use a Bryson DAC3, which besides being a great DAC, as 4 HDMI inputs. I have many Blu Rays/DVD-A and Blu Rays and the DSD and other high res formats can be sent to the DAC over HDMI (a television can also outputHDMI). Perhaps this HDMI feature has zero relevance for you, but the Bryson at about 3.5K is still a great DAC. The Bryston USB inputs are not inferior to their other digital inputs. Many DACs have an Achilles Heel and that is unacceptable, because many streamers only stream over usb. I have also owned the Mytek Manhattan, which has no HDMI but retrieves an unbelievable amount of detail.
Anyway, I would spend 3-5K on a killer DAC, and start slow on the streamer. A PC optimized with a program such as Audirvana Plus or the Bluesound Node2i.
Another 1-2 K on a NAS (Synology or perhaps a Melco N100) if you have a big CD collection to convert to streaming files
As indicated earlier I would buy a great DAC and start with a budget streamer, possibly even a PC. With that budget I would do something much better than the Chord. So ask yourself what features you want in a DAC. I use a Bryson DAC3, which besides being a great DAC, as 4 HDMI inputs. I have many Blu Rays/DVD-A and Blu Rays and the DSD and other high res formats can be sent to the DAC over HDMI (a television can also outputHDMI). Perhaps this HDMI feature has zero relevance for you, but the Bryson at about 3.5K is still a great DAC. The Bryston USB inputs are not inferior to their other digital inputs. Many DACs have an Achilles Heel and that is unacceptable, because many streamers only stream over usb. I have also owned the Mytek Manhattan, which has no HDMI but retrieves an unbelievable amount of detail.
Anyway, I would spend 3-5K on a killer DAC, and start slow on the streamer. A PC optimized with a program such as Audirvana Plus or the Bluesound Node2i.
Another 1-2 K on a NAS (Synology or perhaps a Melco N100) if you have a big CD collection to convert to streaming files