OP, You are correct, both of those boxes are combined. My bad. You definitely want just the DAC function. I did some research on sound quality.. and didn’t pay attention to the functions close enough. This price range is not my specialty.
However, for very musical but with detail in the used market I can definitely recommend the Audio Research Reference 9 DAC or maybe one iteration before that. I never thought of ARC and DACs… until I heard one.