Yeah, the setup of using Zones to do different conversions *definitely* works. But I understand what you mean that it doesn't seem like a full solution. You can't play different zone targeted formats in the same Playing Now for example. It would be nice if MC had more unified support for conversion of DSD and PCM, as you discussed above.
Great! I am glad somebody understand what I mean,
if you have direct 'access' to Jim & Matt, maybe you can check why they resist on implementing this?
On the other hand, does your DAC have native internal DSD support? Or is it converting it to PCM internally? If the later, you might just try letting MC convert all of your DSD to PCM and see how it sounds to you. It might be very very similar to what you hear now. Or not. Your ears will probably tell you.
My DAC is Metronome C6+, it has Amanero USB receiver, what's going inside the device I barely know. Apparently, AKM VERITA 4490 has native DSD input
My friend has EMM XDS1 V2, which for some reason accepts DSD64 only via its USB.
Eventually, I do want to setup two zones, one for Dirac, and another for Direct-to-device. The 'direct' in my setup is mainly for curiosity, as I almost always listen with Dirac.
Yet, going back to original requirement, given a particular zone setup, it is not trivial to say right away what would be a signal path (!)