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

There is a lot of variety in how DACs sound. You might just need a different flavor of DAC, not necessarily a better or more expensive one. I think the mhdt DACs are very good values and a great place to start to set a baseline to see if more is needed.

DACs are intersting in that I find that very good performance can be had for not much these days most likely as a result of increased maturity associated with a large commercial market for products that use DACs. High end audio is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall market and applicability of DACs these days in computers and various digital music devices. Not to say all are good or great, but many are even by most digital audiophile standards. My $300 (used) mhdt Constantine DAC continuously amazes me how well it performs even in comparison to some of the most expensive dacs out there that I have heard. I also have an mhdt Paradisea that cost just a tad more and is also very musical.

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!