It can be hard! Unfortunately, this hobby is filled with snake oil. There are a cadre of companies and people who claim that there is a difference in sound between something like a Chord Mojo with Chord's proprietary filter and discrete circuit output stage compared to something like a Schiit Heresy/Modi which is an op-amp based "clinical" sounding amp paired with an analytical AKM (now ESS) chip.

Well I wanted to get to the bottom of this myself so I purchased a switcher and I compared my Schiit Heresy and my Chord Mojo. I staggered the playback times from two different sources but the same track by two seconds. This is a correction for the first mistake people make when trying to conduct a test like this... they try to time the playback exactly... Well if you do that, when you initiate the switch, you're not listening to the guitar strum you just heard, you're listening to the next one... obviously. So you aren't ever comparing apples to apples. It's actually beneficial to stagger the playback slightly and examine the exact same cymbal hits, the same strums, the same reverb trails.

I took this so seriously, I had my hearing tested at an audiologist beforehand at a not insignificant cost to me (American healthcare and all). My hearing sensitivity is perfect. I can also hear up to 18kHz.

After all this, I have never heard a difference in this test or other tests and I've never heard a difference between a DCS Bartok and anything else 1/10 the price.

Solid state electronics (barring particularly terribly designed ones like the Stellar or ones with high output impedance) are all audibly identical and anyone who claims otherwise is selling snake oil... and in fact this may be 90% of audiophile stores considering their business model and collective livelihoods depend on folks believing there is a difference. Keep in mind that you can purchase a speaker cable that costs $125,000.

Now of course, if you want to get into the rabbit hole of tubes and play with harmonic distortion to get a warmer, less precise, but possibly more relaxing or pleasing sound, that's a thing a lot of people enjoy doing. But for now, I'd focus on just getting a DAC that is well measuring, useful, and one that is affordable enough to reserve your capital for the part of the system that actually matters with real, measurable, and audible differences- the headphones.

Going to go by US prices for a second but if you had purchased an LCD2 Classic for 800$ and a Stellar for 2150$, that would be a total spend of 2950$. That puts you into flagship range for headphones. And if I had 2950$ laying around, I kid you not, I would just buy a Utopia and plug that right into my 9$ Apple Lightning Dongle and sleep very well at night knowing I had better sound than all the people who bought an HD800s and a Burson Conductor or something.