In my view every link in the chain counts. But there seems to be some hostility in this forum about converters. Seems the common consensus is that "it doesn't matter so shut the fk up".
It seems obvious to me that the more you pay, the better they get. So it's probably a matter of buying the best you can afford, and then stick your fingers in your ears and sing la la la if somebody talks about something better than what you've got.
I feel sorry for Lucid, who I think is a good company making good products at a good price. They can't sell to me over the net, so I am forced to deal with they authorised gate keepers. I tried both NZ Lucid agents, and they gave up and refered me to the Australian Lucid agent (because neither NZ agent held stock, and depended on the Australian agent). The Australian agent basically didn't respond to emails quickly, if at all.
When they finally responded when I used a slightly different email address, they offered me a shop soiled DA9624 - but from the correspondance below, I could see that they couldn't find a power supply for it. I asked them to confirm if the price offered included a working power supply, and they have never responded since.
I would have bought a Lavry Black, but I like to pay by VISA, and that wasn't an option.
Our NZ Benchmark agent is totally excellent - I can recommend Lew Wells to all NZ slutz.