Do I Need a New DAC?

Get the Gustard R26 — probably one of the highest performance/$ DACs extant today.  Here’s a good review if you haven’t seen it…

https://soundnews.net/sources/dacs/gustard-a26-dac-review-can-it-get-any-better/
 

Forget bending over backwards to play a few SACDs.  Bite the bullet and start streaming through Qobuz where, for the price of one CD every month, you’ll have access to worlds of new music, much of it in hi-res that’ll make SACD mostly moot. When funds allow buy a used Innuos Zen Mk3 streamer/server that has an onboard CD drive so you can just load all your CDs into it and be done with a transport altogether.  Then you’ll have access to all your music from your chair in any order or playlist you wish along with worlds of new music, which is extremely more exciting than just playing your own music over and over.  Other than a few audiophile recordings that’ll likely never be available to stream, I rarely spin a CD anymore.  At this point, and given all the great music available to stream, spinning a CD now actually seems archaic — like a buggy whip or VCR.  Sorry to be a little preachy here, but just wanted to share my experience and hope it’s at least somewhat helpful.  Best of luck in your journey!

Concerning the Yggdrasil, check out the classified ads over at Head-Fi. I just checked and there are currently several units available used, all for well under $2K.  I also second the motion concerning Qobuz. I started in the music hobby in the late 1960s and Qobuz is the best deal ever for exploring new music as well as listening to your favorites. Hard to compete with a library of 80 million tracks at your fingertips, many in High-Rez. 

Recently, I purchased a dac with a dead optical input. Popped the lid and wrote down the receiver number. This was an rx176. Ordered from Ali baba. Unsolder old part. Install new part and solder.
 

If uncomfortable doing that, parts connexion would “probably” do it. Also if the dac was in need of an upgrade they, probably, would perform that work as well. It’s nice to have options :-). 

I've never found DAD/Blu-ray players are any good at CD/SACDs. Perhaps its due to the laser gap needs to be different.

I'd suggest you look at the Denon DCD-1700NE as an all in one solution. It plays CDs, SACDs, and you can even burn your HD files to DVD-r and it'll play them.

Hello Junge.  You do realize that the SACD is a multi channel medium, yes? Five channel anyway (front L & R, rear L & R, and center. Perhaps I missed it, but you don't mention having a multi channel playback system. The "universal" players should give you all those outputs and you shouldn't need an outboard DAC. Happy listening.