Digital
D/A placement
When two devices could do the D/A conversion, which one should?
Simple
Sometimes your chain has two built-in DACs — say, a streamer that can output analog, feeding an amplifier that also accepts digital. Only one of them ends up converting the signal, and it's worth choosing deliberately: the engine compares both converters and recommends where the conversion should happen, and which cable that implies.
The theory
Once a signal goes analog it stays analog, so the D/A conversion point is the one real architectural choice in a digital chain. The engine scores each candidate's conversion stage on its measured floor — dynamic range and THD+N dominate, conversion-clock jitter and clock accuracy act as tie-breakers — and recommends routing the signal so the better stage does the work: analog cable if the upstream device wins, digital cable if the downstream one does.
For experts
Weighting favors DR (50%) and THD+N (30%) because those set the audible noise-and-distortion floor; jitter (15%) and clock ppm (5%) are margin metrics. Scores are normalized over 95–125 dB DR and −80 to −120 dB THD+N — the realistic span from budget to state-of-the-art converters. When a device publishes no conversion specs, the engine falls back to a category prior (dedicated DAC > streamer section > amp add-on section) and flags the whole comparison as a rule of thumb, because a spec-vs-heuristic comparison is a guess wearing a lab coat. One honesty note to keep in mind: the compatibility checks in the report run over the connection you actually built — the recommendation tells you when a different connection would use the better converter.