I could not say it better....Especially after all the posts lost in this metaphor....
😁😉
The room and speakers are the instruments you hear from, but the DAC is how the signal gets created.
There are people who can hear through bad rooms and mediocre speaker selections but I sure can’t. While this is in a way a debate similar to "which would you rather have, a heart or a pair of lungs?" the room biases everything else.