I'm a believer or

as I was sampling some of my favorite tracks, upon installing my new speaker wires of course, I came across "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, no less. It made me a believer!

now, I'm pretty wet behind the ears when it comes to the audiophile hobby, maybe that's why I am still having a hard time believing that I can change the way my sound "feels" pretty much overnight with a pair of new cables... well, in all honesty I got my "new" cables used from a guy on craigslist for fifty bucks. I'm told they are XLOs (as yet of unknown model) with some nice gold connectors. In either case it was well worth it. In retrospect, if I could've sampled them before buying, I may have very easily paid more than that.

even I know that many threads have been dedicated to the issue of wires, so I will spare the details of richer sound, deeper base, a sort of intangible feeling of measurably more substance to the sound and so on. What I would like to put up for discussion is digital to analog.

Since I'm building the system with pretty much no music collection other than a stack of favorite CDs and endless gigabytes of mp3s (my vynil collection from my dj'ing days notwithstanding), I pretty much decided to go the hard drive (or HTPC?) route for my main source of reproduction. What I'm thinking is to get a DAC and connect it to the digital source, plug the DAC outs into the receiver's analog inputs. What's my best choices for DAC's within 300 dollar range? and also, what should I look to spend on quality analog RCA cables? I'm running a pretty basic setup of a Marantz sr5400 and a pair of B&W 602s so far.

Thanks