In what price range do I need to go for a Dac ?

as a probably-worthless aside, my $59-on-ebay muse audio mini hifi dac (which i've crowed about on these forums) uses the exact same dac and opamps as the op's $1500 simaudio. i know there's more to a dac's sound than just the chip, but i'd actually be curious to compare the two. i do agree with arnettpartners that the mf v-dac is a genuine giant-killer.

I have a few tracks on my music server that I recorded about 5-6 years ago during my initial recent foray into computer audio. I used an audioquest stereo mini to dual phono analog IC into my Denon CD recorder. The source was various Real Player live music streams. Then I ripped the tracks from recorded CD to music server as lossless .wav using my standard process.

This was using a very compact but decent quality Dell laptop from about 10 years ago or so.

This was not reference quality source material, but the results are quite good and very musical compared the rest of my music library given that they were produced using the most primitive approach I have applied in recent years. One would be hard pressed to question their quality overall, though dynamics are perhaps a tad compressed.

Easily in the same league or perhaps even better than the best home cassette recordings one might have made using earlier analog home technology. CLearly superior at least in terms of noise levels.

SO I guess my point is we are way better off these days in regards to affordable yet very good quality home (digital) audio than ever before. Its a great time to be both a music lover and audiophile!

+ 1 on MF V-DAC ...very very good for the money

FWIW I like the 260D better than a $4,000 Meridian I once owned. If you like the basic big boned presentation of the 260D you may flip over the 650

For less than 2k the Burson conductor with the ESS SABRE32 Dac chip seems promising. It acts as a preamp too.