Merkurio
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2018
- Messages
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You hit the nail on the head—sound quality does not differentiate DACs, feature sets do.
For me, I’d rather have my DAC perform D/A conversion and nothing else. DSP functions like the ones you mention can be performed through software located on the playback device—computer, tablet, or phone—or on the server.
This is viable when the software is powerful and stable enough.
For example, SoundSource on macOS is a joy to use with no major complains whatsoever for a system wide PEQ solution, meanwhile Equalizer APO + Peace GUI on Windows is a piece of crap (both GUI and integration-wise) which breaks with every Windows update.
That's why having hardware capability to EQ is such a demanded feature and RMEs have great reputation.