When there's cake to be had we want to eat it. Features and services? We want those too just not with any added sonic penalties.
Take for example the idea of getting DSD into your DAC using the coax/RCA input. On many DACs, the only way to get DSD in its pure form into the DAC is via either USB or I2S. Using the S/PDIF RCA input gets you nothing.
The cake and eat it too solution? DoP.
DoP is DSD over PCM and I understand there's a lot of misunderstanding about this magic trick. More than a few folks consider DoP to be a conversion of DSD to PCM which is not accurate.
What is accurate is that it can be quite confusing.
On the one hand, DoP is using the PCM format. On the other hand, the actual DSD data is unchanged.
How does this magic trick work?
First, the problem. DSD is one long continuous stream which DACs and computers don't handle well. They prefer smaller chunks of data, each chunk having a name and destination tag to tell the device what to do with it.
What DoP does is simple. It just breaks up the long chain and repackages the exact same data in smaller chunks DACs and computers can deal with.
I like to think of it like one of those freight trains you see carrying semi trailers. Each semi trailer is filled with chunks of DSD information.
At no time has the DSD data been altered—same data just broken into chunks and then later reassembled inside the DAC.
Good when you can have your DSD and eat it too.
