There's actually quite a bunch of less than $199 solutions (and also not requiring a soldering iron) the OP could also have used to achieve a good experience listening to music.
One solution would have been to just buy that 15 year old hardware he talks about, a lot of older digital music players still just work, I have a bunch of them. Or an external soundcard for a laptop. Or stream music from phone to a Raspberry Pi with a DAC. Or a portable CD player which doesn't hiss.
One solution would have been to just buy that 15 year old hardware he talks about, a lot of older digital music players still just work, I have a bunch of them. Or an external soundcard for a laptop. Or stream music from phone to a Raspberry Pi with a DAC. Or a portable CD player which doesn't hiss.