@hudsonhawk where “While this is accurate, to my understanding no DAC can truly handle both PCM and DSD natively”
I agree with @nquery
You’re right only in the context of a single DAC engine. However there are DAC’s that do both natively, what you’re looking at is 2 DAC’s built in. There has to be a detector that sniffs out the incoming signal and and determines if it’s DSD, or PCM. Usually this is done in conjunction with a FPGA chip which will process the DSD directly, else it will send the signal to the R2R circuit.
I agree with @nquery
You’re right only in the context of a single DAC engine. However there are DAC’s that do both natively, what you’re looking at is 2 DAC’s built in. There has to be a detector that sniffs out the incoming signal and and determines if it’s DSD, or PCM. Usually this is done in conjunction with a FPGA chip which will process the DSD directly, else it will send the signal to the R2R circuit.