Hi jdjaye,
I've been occasionally lurking on this forum for a bit, but I just registered because I literally just went through this process with roughly the same budget (though I was also looking for headphone amplification). The posts already in this thread cover many of the options I was going to mention, but there are 2 others you might consider. Both were suggested to me on other forums during my search:
Gustard x12- this is just a robust, well-implemented sabre dac from what I hear. The company is Chinese, I believe mostly known in the headphone community for their ~$400 amp that drives current hungry planars well. You should be able to find some healthy forum threads about it- though I don't know if it's considered in bad taste to say where... (this is my first post)
Mousai MSD192- As far as I am aware this is a Questyle Q192 without the headphone amplifier- I don't think it ever got particularly popular, but the mastering engineer who built my heavily modified custom headphones gave it a good review- quite neutral he said.
Also, if you can get a good price on a Geek Pulse, I suspect you would be quite pleased with it. I'm currently running a LH Labs Geek Out V2+ Wyred 4 Sound Recovery, and while my headphones are under-powered, the Dac performance is excellent for the price. (at least compared to the pro audio dacs I am used to).
If you would consider adding a bit to the budget, then you'll hit the price range where things start to get more interesting-especially if you're curious about multibit dacs. Alongside the multibit version of the previously mentioned Bifrost, you can get a 1704 chip dac from Audio GD, or even a discrete R2R dac (soekris dac1101- Lesloss are using the diy version of its PCB in their upcoming 5k dac, read into that what you will...). Heck, you could even get a MHDT Labs Atlantis- an NOS tube dac with yet another differend multibit chip (AD1862). Your options open up on the delta-sigma side of things as well, but I haven't been paying as much attention to that part of the market recently- I want a dac that keeps the original samples intact when it filters- and right now the options for that are all multibit afaik (NOS, the Schiit multibit dacs, or putting a custom filter onto the Soekris dac1101).
Best of luck in your search!
