Welcome to the RME forum.

My personal $0.02 to this topic. You have to decide for yourself whether you want the convenience / features of an ADI-2 DAC in your recording setup or not.

Even if there shouldn't be much difference between different converter chips today in terms of transparent / high-quality D/A conversion, some of the features of the ADI-2 DAC could still be of interest to you: dynamic loudness, PEQ, auto reflevel, the option to select D/A filters to maybe find out, like KaiS, that one of these filters makes percussive elements in the sound easier to locate (https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.ph … 68#p177168), but that also depends on the quality of audio source and whether your setup can reproduce it (quality of active monitors, placement, room acoustics) and ultimately also whether you can hear it. I could also imagine that practiced/trained ears hear more details or if you are a musician how this or that instrument sounds.

On the other hand, you can certainly get an excellent listening experience with the D/A converters of the UCX II like I did with my old UFX before the series of ADI-2 Pro/DAC devices entered the scene.

In my setup I am using two ADI-2 Pro FS R BE to have it's quality and features for the recording corner and in front of my High-End HiFi in my living room.

It is also very nice to turn the PC into a music player (MusicBee is a nice player with ASIO support and the possibility to control the player via Android devices via a plugin).

Then you can put a TOSLINK switcher with remote control in front of the ADI-2 DAC/Pro to use different devices as audio sources (PC, TV, Bluray player, streamer). Then the hi-fi system can also be used as Main Out B in TotalMix FX.

There are many possible uses and the trick is, in my opinion, to combine the devices as cleverly as possible in order to obtain additional benefits.

ADI-2 DAC/Pro can be used very flexibly anyway: