To follow up on my testing, I did not have good results setting Strawberry volume slider to 50 percent, if that, indeed, equates to -3 dB.

70 percent seemed better to my ears. Computer master volume remained at 100 percent. DAC is connected to my computer via USB.

Incidentally, on further reading about this topic, the term(s) used is "intersample peak clipping", or "intersample overs".

+1 for this.

I am moving over to strawberry on linux over using dopamine on windows. On dopamine, I have about 300 smart playlists (I have about 18k songs in my collection too). The smart playlists being ordered alphabetically by default, instead of creation order (I assume that's what it uses?) would increase navigability.

It would be really nice if we could make playlist folders too (e.g. i have some playlists based around artists, some based around genres, and so on, and it would be nice to group them), but all of them listed alphabetically would be great!