DAC Hat vs. Other DAC?

[grasshopper]

Thanks for most helpful info.

Since I don’t stream and mainly listen to same music ripped from my CD’s to Flac. Is it pointliness to have higher priced DAC’s? Since it will always be CD quality 44KHz.

I did buy an album off of qobuz at higher rate, honestly did not hear a dramatic difference either.
Maybe aging ears it the issue, then save a ton of money going back to mp3’s and cheap gear. :-)

No.  A higher priced DAC should in theory sound better, but unless the rest of your system is on par, incuding cabling, the PSU etc, the improvement will be constrained.  
I would suggest visiting a hifi store & take along a MoOde player if that will be your source, powered by a battery & some music you're very familiar with on a USB stick & see if they will show you some combinations of components within your budget.  
I only use individual components on my headphone setups, for my speaker setup I upgraded it recently to a KEF Wireless II system & a couple of KC62 subs, so they did all the hard work in matching components for me and it is night & day better than my previous setup which all went on eBay.

Playing local files or streaming from Tidal etc is irrelevent really.