> You make it sound like $10 of electronics would give great sound No, that's not what I wanted to convey. But if you get yourself $100/€100 90s HiFi Amps on e

> You make it sound like $10 of electronics would give great sound No, that's not what I wanted to convey. But if you get yourself $100/€100 90s HiFi Amps on eBay, you are pretty much there, in my opinion for domestic HiFi use. You might want to blow out the dust, replace the scratchy volume knob, and bypass the rusty input-selector switches, though... If you talk studios, of course some other factors are getting important such as the proper input connectors (most HiFi has Cinch/RCA, studios will have XLR at +4dBU levels), being able to put into a 19" rack and operate for long times at an elevated temperature, having a stepped, instead of a continuous, gain selector to have repeatability when setting up multi-amp systems..., but that's not really related to the audio quality, noise or distortion. You'll pay for all these features, and for additional build quality. > loose n% of the signal on every iteration, and you do 100s of iterations If you do 100s of iterations, you are doing something wrong! People do run 100s of iteratios for fiddling with parameters, but they'll NOT always re-record and play back every time. Just imagine the additional noise, not from the converters, but from the outboard gear mainly, adding up! Especially as people tend to like using outboard gear for the imperfect reproduction and coloring that analog provides. But also for studio use, there's the crappy end (say, <€50 soundcards/audio interfaces) which will have easily noticeable hiss and spurs from badly shielded DC/DC converters you can easily see in any spectrum analyzer software. As soon as you are above $1000/€800 or so for a name-brand 8-ch in/out converter, I claim that you will not be able to measure any difference to a >€5000 2ch "32-bit, 192kHz, Mastering AD/DA with rubidium clock".