Is a lossless signal path better than enhanced signal path?

Is food better without salt ?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That is why salt shakers exist.

DSP, whether room convolution, upsampling with apodizing filters in Roon or HQ Player or software MQA decoding, can be used for the purpose of higher fidelity reproduction of the original music by correcting room response, shifting noise or avoiding unnecessary processing and consequent noise in a DAC. Just as salt can be used to shift the balance of flavours back to some notional ideal after cooking.

Assigning qualitative terms like “better” or “worse” to DSP as a whole is an overgeneralisation.

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