Relaxed/Analog sounding DAC for under $10k (used or new)

@steakster - thanks, I am fairly confident it is the DAC that is bordering on the slightly bright side of things. I've spoken to another owner of the DAC (there aren't many of us!) who experienced some of the same brightness. Don't get me wrong - it's not incredibly bright to where I'm desperate to replace - but it's on the bright side of neutral for me. If I use oversampling at all, it makes it exponentially worse. It pushes mids and highs to a point where sure they may be very detailed and open sounding, but it's quite unbalanced and ends up making vocals very sibilant where they may not have been before. Of course, when criticizing gear, we're often focusing on magnifying little negatives and they can come across in writing as a lot more extreme than they actually are, so wanted to clarify a bit that it isn't anything extreme, just on the brighter side of neutral in my system and I'd prefer on the warmer side of neutral.

I am considering a future upgrade to an Innuos Pulsar streamer from my Zen MK3, but it's not high on the priority list right now. I do want to stick with Innuos though as I really like their Sense program. I already have a LAN filter in use that I've had for some time, and have tested with and without and it has no impact on any of these perceived small sound issues.
 

@audphile1 - The input impedence of my linestage is 50 kOhm, so I'd assume that wouldn't be the issue. I did recently swap all of my interconnect cables to Triode Wire Lab spirits, and those made a nice improvement in my overall sound (in both digital and analog chains).

I don't experience this same slight imbalance on my analog playback, so that narrows it down to the streamer and the dac. The streamer did not have this issue with my previous dac, but introducing the new dac and living with it a while is when I started to notice it, especially with longer listening sessions (the first month or so I was very busy with work so was limited to an hour or two a day at most).

I really, honestly, just think that the DAC isn't the best synergistic match with the rest of my system, not that the DAC is 'bad' or anything. That's just how it is sometimes and that's totally ok. I don't want to try to force a square block in a round hole, so to speak, when the solution might just be to replace the unit with something that works better with the rest of my gear. Of course, I will need to demo options in my system, and that is absolutely a must for me before committing to my next DAC. Won't know til I try!

And yeah. I suppose the whole 'wanting digital to sound analog' chase is silly, but *for me* that really just distills down to looking for slightly warmer, natural, non-fatiguing sound. A lot of high end 'hifi' these days tends to overemphasize detail retrieval over all else and it's often very fatiguing for me - especially since I'm often listening my entire work day.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions so far (either for specific gear or possible other avenues to look into)! I appreciate all the feedback.

for 10K, it should also do your laundry and pay your taxes

I have developed over years a severe aversion/sensibility for all exacerbating high frequencies artefact. I had to change my integrated amplifier 3 times, my DAC 3 times, my speakers 3 times, my music server 2 times along with various cable changes. The worse error I made was to hang-on to my Spendor D7 not realizing they were the biggest source of high frequencies listening fatigue.

In the end, after all these changes (integrated amp Accuphase E-370, music server Innuos Zenith MK3, speakers Pierre-Etienne Léon Kantor S3.2), I noticed that my PS Audio Directstream DAC MK1 (even after the output transformer upgrade) was giving me some listening fatigue, but I could have stopped there. But then, my old Micromega CDF1 CD player gave out - I was only using it very sparingly with most of my listening being done through the DSD MK1 DAC. After some shopping around for a new CD player, I was intrigue by the Marantz SACD 30n: it was both a CD player and a DAC accepting USB input, and was doing a DSD conversion (which I found much smoother than PCM when properly implemented) using the Marantz Musical Mastering (MMM) digital-to-analog converter as a lesser version than the one available on their Reference SACD and CD Player SA-10. To this day, I have not found one single PCM implementation that did not cause me listening fatigue (be it DAC chips, R2R, Chord pulse-array). To my surprise, after some serious listening, I found that the Marantz SACD 30n provided me with more details, more natural tones, and warmer/richer medium frequencies than the DSD MK1 DAC, so much so that I sold the DSD MK1 DAC and replaced it permanently with the Marantz 30n.

It should be mentioned that I listen almost exclusively to Sacred Choral chants and listening fatigue can come very very quickly if the high frequencies (sibilance) are too present. I am now retired, bought my Marantz 30n back in March 2022 (Capitalsound.ca for CAD$3,800) and do not plan to upgrade my sound system any time soon.