Well at least you can engage the bypass for DVD-Audio and evaluate whether the cure is worse than the disease. I'd rather see 96/24 but I'm not worried about it. The room effects typical in an environment will be much worse than the unwanted distortion introduced by a well done 48kHz conversion. This box has been very well reviewed and also measures very well.

24 vs. 16 bits is a pretty huge difference in range, several orders of magnitude. Sample rate is less so, 10% higher, but my experience has been that well done sampling implementations prove Nyquist correct. Obviously higher sample rates make things easier in some ways, but I'm not building a system to entertain bats. The 20Hz rolloff is more a concern, but I can live with it. It may not be a rolloff - the 0.5 down may be reflecting the rolloff at 20kHz more than 20Hz.

I think it deserves a try.

I strongly suspect the payoff is going to be much better than the added (unwanted) distortion. And, as you say, at $100 per channel I can't ignore it.