You seem to like the word "lay". Anything you disagree with just becomes a lay opinion or someone is a layman. When one stops learning, they cease to exist.
Let's test if you want to learn.
A common assumption in these optimizers is that less is more. In other words, the less activity must somehow make the DAC perform better. Let's say the DAC is poorly designed such that it eats up the computer noise. You have two choices:
1. 1000 times a second something happens.
2. 1000,000 times a second something happens.
Which is better? Lay assumption about audio says #1. Less is more.
Wrong! 1000 times a second generates a frequency in the audible band. It can for example create clock jitter to the tune of +- 1,000. So your 2 Khz note now has a sideband at 1000 Hz and another at 3000 kHz. Compare that with the 1,000,000 time activity. It is occuring so fast that it will appear as noise. Noise is much more benign than generating correlated distortions as #1 does.
Remember, I test all of these DACs using my laptop that is also driving the audio analyzer. The analyzer software for APx555 is a huge CPU hog, so much so that it cooks my laptop. It uses tremendous amount of CPU cycles and lots of traffic on the USB bus. Yet, we are able to achieve measurements that are unbelievably clean with well designed hardware. No audio tuner is needed or necessary.
Anything that is designed to plug into a computer must assume that it has unknown ability to interfere with the DAC. Design the DAC well and what the computer does is immaterial.
None of this is known to people who don't know how DACs work, psychoacoustics, signal processing, etc. They are using lay assumption of making things quieter in the PC with no confirmation I might add, to make decisions that are just wrong.
The tuner software cripples the computer from functionality point of view making it much harder to use. All for misguided reasoning.
