Obviously an intermittent connection is a different type of problem from having a converter that's engineered to alter the bitstream in some way. Again, the latter would require digital signal processing, which you would notice in the price, especially for a unit the age of the CO2.
For new digital equipment, and increasingly so in the future, DSP will be relatively cheap so it conceivably might be snuck into something where you didn't expect it. On the other hand, it could also be so high in quality that you wouldn't mind having it (e.g. modern asynchronous sampling rate converters costing $5 to implement are worlds better than the early ones that cost $500+).