To be clear, it wasn't like I felt the sound is lacking. To my non-audiophile ears it's sounds perfectly fine. I wouldn't say excellent just because I haven't tried anything else.
I was mostly curious to try out a DAC seeing people are willing to spend hundreds-thousands of bucks on them, and to see if I would notice any difference.
I have "vintage" B&Ws towers (not some fancy model I think) and a "vintage" Nakamichi amp. Both going back 25-30 years. I have a "vintage" Marantz CD player from the same era that I pulled out of storage. It's still mostly working fine but had trouble loading some CDs (mostly worked after a few tries, and a couple wouldn't load). I always disliked using headphones, I have some cheap Chinese ones for emergencies.
Options were to try to service the CD player (maybe like $100? If I can even find someone to do it and do it well) or buy some decent but not too expensive CD player ($300?). Neither appealed to me, so I bought a barely used 2nd hand BD player for $30 (original MSRP was like $500 in 2010). Then E30 for $90-100 (like new) to see if it would improve on what already sounded good enough to me. As you can see frugality is a running theme here
I'm curious to hear how would you improve with a few hundred bucks. Replacing the speakers?
Yeah, thats where I was saying to focus the efforts. I was wondering if you had something like a cheap, plastic computer speaker set or something... limiting your ability to tell differences.
Sounds like the opposite is the "problem". You have decent, if a bit old, speakers, so not a lack of quality there... but, with that $500 player you probably have started with a pretty good DAC. ;-) Maybe trying against a 10y old, $30 retail CD player or something, and you'd notice a difference.
Theres a fair amount of good speakers in the below $500 catagory, including the recent JBL's in Amir's review today... thats where I'd tell someone to spend $ to start improving their system.
Good speakers, learn a bit of proper placment in the room to optimise your speaker setup... and you've gone a long way to good sound.