...sometimes (or rather often, it depends) the trick for best audio results lies in ignoring most or all the functions that seem to have made it to a product only as a way to justify its price, or to win in a comparison chart against competitors ("this has it, others do not"), despite the function having any use in real world, or beneficial effect.
home hifi enthusiasts from the '70s, '80s, '90s might remember the age when devices started to grow more buttons and switches than trees in a forest.
the subsequent wave of "esoteric" audio devices, then, came with hardly even a power on and off switch.
in reality, the war for keeping position on the market often invents medicines before the illness even appears to affect population.
where i failed in my predictions is, i had not envisioned that the same would have happened to software products, exactly in the same way.
which leads to: if you don't know exactly what it does, or how it does it, ignoring it might help to avoid the worst.
like what you are currently describing here, on this forum: adding gain (and, thus, digital clipping) to music program material that's most likely to have been mastered already on the "as hot as possible" area of peak levels won't improve your listening experience.
had you chosen a lesser converter, with no reliable read-out of levels, you wouldn't have possibly learnt it was happening.
but, alas, there's no learning possible without trial-and-error process, or the academia.
which means, when you finally learn what caused it, and you just solved it: now you know more! which is why some of us in audio develop obsessions that are such fun to live with: like audio. :-)
keep searching, keep reading, keep asking. answers just wait to be found (and shared)!