Article: Chord Electronics Qutest DAC Review

[Sonis]

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[Sonis]

On 8/26/2019 at 12:21 PM, barrows said:

Your emergency backup battery supply is probably not anything like the supply for the Hugo 2.  It is very likely that this supply uses very noisy switching regulators to provide the 5 VDC output on its USB port.  It is likely that the output of this supply is both relatively high in impedance and noise.

I would suggest trying a true audiophile quality linear power supply with the Qutest to achieve its best possible performance.  My brother owns the Qutest, and I designed a very good linear supply for him, and he finds the Qutest, with this linear supply performs at a much higher level than with its stock power supply.

I took the power supply “brick” apart and there is no switching regulator for the 5v USB power. It seems to be a standard 5V IC regulator. Looking at the output with my 100 MHz Tektronix scope, It looks clean as a whistle. No noise. And the wall-wart is equally clean. 

 

IOW, your concerns occurred to me as well.

[Sonis]

1 hour ago, Luvdac said:

Power supply is the culprit in my experience. I have the chord hugo 2 and currently use its internal battery. Even when connected to an ifi imicro usb 3's power output which in turn is fed by a botw 9v linear power supply, the sound does not reach the level of relaxed ness as with the hugo 2 just on it's own juice.

Also the lower freqs seem to be missing something when plugged into the wall.  

 

Interesting. Even when connected to the mains, on the Hugo 2, the device is still running on it’s internal battery, the mains connection is simply charging the battery.

 

[Sonis]

13 hours ago, audiobomber said:

Qutest is an awful name. They should have stuck with their original nomenclature and called it Quincy, or Frank or George. I'm a man. I don't want anything cute in my audio rack. 😝

 

Could be construed as homophobia, but for what it’s worth, I concur. 

[Sonis]

14 hours ago, rossb said:

I've owned all the Chord DACs - DAVE, TT2, Hugo 2, and Qutest. I also had the Blu 2 with the DAVE and the M Scaler with the TT2 and Qutest. I've now sold them all because I have moved on to other things. 

 

However, I agree with the conclusion in this review. I think the Hugo 2 sounds noticeably better than the Qutest. I actually think that the Hugo 2 is the best sounding of all the Chord DACs. DAVE sounds thin. TT2 sounds small and hard. Qutest has a slightly astringent sound. And the Blu 2/M Scaler is massively overrated. 

 

The Qutest does benefit from a linear PSU and a power conditioner, and the optical input is the best sounding input. But the Hugo 2 still sounds better. 

Amen to all of that, brother! The Hugo2 does sound significantly better than the Qutest. And I stand-by my conclusion that if you buy a Qutest on the strength of hearing a Hugo2, and think that the Qutest will sound as good (or even the same) as the Hugo2 because the DAC portions of the two devices are supposedly identical, you will be sorely disappointed!

[Sonis]

4 hours ago, audiobomber said:

I don't see it, and certainly nothing like that intended. Audio is a male market. How would you like a Ford F150 Qutest pickup truck? Would that be a big seller?

Don’t take it so seriously. I merely meant that requiring the name of a device to be “butch”, as in more masculine could be construed as homophobic. I didn’t say that it actually was homophobic. What I meant by my comments is that it happens quite often that model names of consumer products is changed for gender purposes. After all, do you think that the Datsun 240Z would have sold as well in the USA had it been imported as a Datsun Fairlady? That’s what it was called in Japan, you know...

[Sonis]

36 minutes ago, photonman said:

What about a Ford F150 Daisy or Ballerina.  They would be flying off the dealer lots!

 

I keep flopping back and forth between the wall wart and my CI Audio MKII 5v LPS.  I am not sure I hear a difference but to qualify this, I am streaming Spotify pop and rock.  Some songs sound great ( especially acoustical) and some sound dull and flat which points back to the source code.  So in my case I think the source has more effect on my sound enjoyment than the power supply.  I have settled on the optical input too.  I have a dedicated line too.  When music is stopped my speakers are dead quiet, no ocean noise.

Most electronic pop and rock is so “overproduced” and dynamically compressed that dull and flat (as in lifeless, not flat as in a linear frequency response from DC to daylight) seem to be the sound that the producers of these genres are going for! The rock albums that I have bought or saved to Tidal as favorites (because I like the music, not because they sound good) are very mediocre. Even rock and pop labeled “master” is nothing to write home about! I mean you could transfer Edison cylinders to DSD or 32-bit, 768 KHz LPCM, and it still wouldn’t sound any better than it did as an acoustically recorded cylinder. There has to be something “there” on the recording in the first place for so-called Hi-Res to improve the presentation. Nothing can make-up for poor or badly produced recordings.

[Sonis]

5 hours ago, chrille said:

The Qutest has obviously just been awarded an EISA award this year.

I bought a Qutest last year and I am using it with an Chord Hugo MScaler.

To my ears and with my headphones HD800 and HEKV2 the Qutest on its own was a better option for me with a good headphone amp added.

Hugo 2 did not drive either of my headphones with enough authority and weight with LARGE SCALE NON COMPRESSED classical music.

With an Mscaler added I am closer to both a TT2 and a DAVE/HMS than I would be with a Hugo 2.

The Mscaler is imho absolutely essential with all Chord dacs, including DAVE. 

To me its influence to the end result is so important that I prefer my Qutest /HMS combo over a DAVE on its own.

PS it sounds better with a battery powered psu compared to the supplied smps as well.

Cheers Chrille

Well, the Qutest does sound good. No doubt about it. But “good” is a relative thing. After all, sounding very much like a current-build Schiit Yggdrasil, for $500 less money is certainly nothing to sneeze at. In my opinion (for what it’s worth), that makes it eligible for an EISA award in my book.

[Sonis]

4 hours ago, davide256 said:

I have to regard this review as unhelpful because it has not been reviewed with a quality PS. The Hugo 2 may make a great portable but its lack

of normal DAC input options makes it impractical as a main system DAC...you would have to go to a Hugo TT which is triple the price of a Qutest.

Has anyone seen a review where the Uptone Audio  power supplies or like PS was used with Qutest? I need to  move on from the multibit Gungnir because its

inexpensive AC power supply solution is causing bass sustenuto and transient dynamics deficiencies compared to my previous Metrum Octave DAC.

I reviewed this DAC in what I considered the manner in which most buyers would use it. From that standpoint, I disagree with your characterization of the review as unhelpful. I did, briefly, try a high-output battery supply on the Qutest, but didn’t find that if made much, if any discernible difference. Even that was “cheating” because it’s not using the product the way the manufacturer designed it. I tried the battery supply because I wanted to make the Qutest sound as much like the Hugo 2 as possible (which comes with a built-in battery supply). Aside from the lack of it’s own battery supply and built-in headphone amplifier, the Hugo 2 and the Qutest are supposed to be the exact same DAC circuit, but I could never get the Qutest to sound as good as the Hugo 2.