If you’re thinking of waiting to change DAC’s in 5-years or so, it’s difficult to predict what will be the latest and greatest then, at your price point. Digital is obviously changing at a much faster rate than any other hardware components.
Regarding my front-end sojourn, my first high-end CD Player was a Meridian. From it, I moved to a Wadia CDP, followed by PC Audio in 2006, with the purchase of a Wavelength Audio Brick (Silver). Since then, I have owned a: Wavelength Crimson, Lampizator Big7, Lampizator Golden Gate and presently a dCS Rossini.
The Lampizator’s were wonderful DAC’s. However, their care and feeding was for me, a bit more tweaky than I wanted at this stage in my life. Plus, really great tubes (4) for the balanced DAC that were newly produced were quite expensive and not that dependable. The same could be said for switching between CD sample rates and upstream USB devices and cables. I wanted something that required zero care, babysitting (if you will) and tweaking. The dCS Rossini with its Ethernet input and my use of Roon, ticked my robust, turn-it-on and just play it box. Plus, I really love the Rossini’s sound. It’s more detailed than my Lampizator’s, yet not fatiguing. I’m running it direct into my Atma-sphere MA-1 amps and that seems to do it for me.
At any rate, I’ve read and heard good things about the aforementioned DAC’s in this thread and I’m sure are all good, especially the Bricasti, which I’ve heard with SoundLab U1PX’s. But as with everything in this hobby, your flavor may not be my flavor and an-in-home DAC audition if it can be done, is pretty much mandatory.