However audiophiles are a whole different level. People spend tens of thousands of dollars on items that have questionable difference in quality. I guess people do the same with cars though, a Toyota Corolla will get you to work just as well as a Rolls Royce Phantom.
Wine loaded with sugar??? AFAIK, in a dry wine all the sugar is converted to alcohol- even in the case it's been added before the fermentation, which is still pretty rare, at least in major wine producing countries. That is definitely not the difference between a $5 and $20 bottle of wine (in Italy you can still get excellent wine for $5 a bottle if you buy it from the producer, btw).
search for "brut nature" which for cava, champagne and the like means it's only the sugar in the grapes themselves.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetness_of_wine#Residual_sug...
If you just want to put together a cheap car with a good engine, that's a different thing from wanting to build a comfortable or speedy car with a good engine. Someone who isn't in the market for that extra level will just be a sceptic and say "this Audi is just a volkswagen with a prettier body", but if you sit in one you'll feel the difference. (not sure if Audi's have VW engines)
Digital to analog conversion is a solved problem, with inexpensive commodity parts. Even if you buy an expensive DAC, the studio gear used to produce the music you listen to has gone through dozens of A->D->A conversions, all done using standard commodity parts. No one builds fancy audiophile-approved DACs and ADCs into mixer or studio gear.
In my home setup, I'm using a DBX DriveRack PX as a DSP EQ and crossover between my main monitors and subs. It's almost a decade old, but its signal/noise ratio is on par with the newest gear you can buy. Any competently built pro gear from the last ~10-15 years with 24-bit conversion can be plugged right into any analog signal chain and be 100% audibly transparent.
People worry way too much about the electronics, and way too little about their speakers and rooms.
An Audi also has just a couple thousand of extra love worth of physical cost added to it, but the retail price is easily upwards of $20.000 above the equivalent VW car. That's because if you sell fewer units, the r&d and marketing costs per unit are much higher, as well as the required profit per car sold.
If you get a good deal on your hardware, you might have that good DAC in a nice box with a pretty manual for $50 physical costs, then put it on a prime shelf in a nice Hi-Fi store for $130 (30% of $400), maybe $50 to target and prime your customer, and then use $150 to pay your audio engineer, your CEO, maybe outsource the rest of the company infrastructure, and then 8% interest to your lenders. That's 1.7M profit at 10.000 units sold (assuming that you do all of this within a year).
I have no idea if 10.000 units is close to reasonable for an indie hardware startup, but calculations become a little more complex if we're going to have to take a multi year ramp up in account..
edit: Sorry I got caught up a little in the startup aspect of it. Your system sounds great, but your DAC (and DSP+crossover system) also cost $400, so you're not making a point?
The DAC I use cost less than $30, yet performs well beyond the limits of human hearing. The DriveRack did have an MSRP around $300 when it was new, but usually $200 on sale, but it does do a whole lot more than a DAC, and the base price level for pro gear is somewhat higher than for consumer gear.
As I said, people focus way too much on electronics, when even basic devices are more than good enough. I don't even have to use the DAC anymore, after I switched to DisplayPort for my monitor, which has a perfectly good analog stereo output. The only reason I keep the Toslink DAC hooked up is pure laziness.