Interesting idea - I never would've thought to look at the internals, mainly because I have no idea what I'm looking at. Thinking through both poster's points about Digital Pre vs. DAC - they seem to have the same feature set. Same # of inputs, outputs, etc. - no room correction, effects or anything like that. With that in mind, what constitutes one as a pre vs simply a DAC (marketing aside)?
"High end" audio is so confusing...