It will not be quite as good; when designing Blu 2's OP truncators, I had the 768 kHz noise shapers (guaranteeing 350 dB performance so maintaining the original precision), gaussian dither and TPDF dither; TPDF had the worst sound quality with a reduction in depth. Gaussian gave closer to the noise shaper performance (about half way). So there are for sure (small but audible) transparency losses involved in TPDF. The Gaussian was pseudo; I am hoping a better Gaussian will improve transparency further - this is important for Davina project when I need 16 bit 44.1. Hugo 2 uses the same 768 kHz noise shapers for truncation. Having said all that, I suspect that software volume would be more transparent than an analogue volume control though.
Would a resistor relayed step attenuator mitigate the loss of transparency in volume? For instance, a passive preamp with just pure resistor relayed step attenuator (100 dB steps) in the analogue path to control the volume after the 3V output from Qutest
I imagine that would be more transparent than digital software volume though
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