Best investment to upgrade my digital chain?

[frieddr]

Hi - I have an Uptone Etheregen feeding an SoTM SMS 200 Ultra through an SOTM TxUSB Ultra with SOTM PSU to a Chord Qutest DAC. Which of the following would be the best investment to improve the chain: add used Chord mscaler; Replace Qutest with used TT2; add used SoTM sCLK-OCX10 (hard to find) to link to streamer and USB reclocker; replace the SoTM equipment with used Auralic Aries G2 (hard to find); replace Etheregen with Network Acoustics Eno.

[audiobomber]

IME, the DAC is the most significant link in the chain, i.e. more important than what feeds it. You've done a lot of cleaning upstream already. A DAC upgrade will make a bigger difference than more cleaning.

[kurb1980]

Go fiber then you can keep your ether ditch all the other components.  Get a better psu for your chord.  Try something like opticalRendu that would paire well with ether use the SFP modules to connect the two.  That should maximize what you already got and remove all the extra components in your chain.

[botrytis]

7 hours ago, kurb1980 said:

Go fiber then you can keep your ether ditch all the other components.  Get a better psu for your chord.  Try something like opticalRendu that would paire well with ether use the SFP modules to connect the two.  That should maximize what you already got and remove all the extra components in your chain.

 

So, you want the OP to get more noise not less? I have tried all what you have said and sold it all, because it makes the noise worse not better. 

[dericchan1]

To OP, try this set up with your Qutest and if it works for you, you will manage to save the cost of upgrade AND manage further saving by selling the rest of your upstream tweaks

 

Hqplayer desktop (upsample everything to 24/768 PCM) -> Cat 6 out to raspberry pi 4 (Hqplayer NAA) -> USB out to Intona USB isolator -> Qutest  OR

 

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2022/10/using-low-power-beelink-mini-s-as-linux.html use one of these low power mini PC and run Hqplayer embedded -> USB out to Intona USB isolator -> Qutest

[audiobomber]

19 minutes ago, dericchan1 said:

To OP, try this set up with your Qutest and if it works for you, you will manage to save the cost of upgrade AND manage further saving by selling the rest of your upstream tweaks

 

Hqplayer desktop (upsample everything to 24/768 PCM) -> Cat 6 out to raspberry pi 4 (Hqplayer NAA) -> USB out to Intona USB isolator -> Qutest  OR

 

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2022/10/using-low-power-beelink-mini-s-as-linux.html use one of these low power mini PC and run Hqplayer embedded -> USB out to Intona USB isolator -> Qutest

The sMS-200Ultra already has the HQPlayer NAA onboard, and a Raspberry Pi does not compete sonically with the OP's SOtM gear. 

[dericchan1]

4 minutes ago, audiobomber said:

The sMS-200Ultra already has the HQPlayer NAA onboard, and a Raspberry Pi does not compete sonically with the OP's SOtM gear. 

 

Then there's no point for further upgrades other than using Hqplayer. 

[frieddr]

I'm pretty attached to Roon.  

[dericchan1]

You can use hqplayer as renderer within Roon

[kurb1980]

1 hour ago, botrytis said:

 

So, you want the OP to get more noise not less? I have tried all what you have said and sold it all, because it makes the noise worse not better. 

I don’t know your system but there is no such thing as all 100 noise removal it can’t be done.  You can reduce the noise considerably.  For me and my setup fiber did make a difference I could hear.  

[dericchan1]

2 minutes ago, kurb1980 said:

I don’t know your system but there is no such thing as all 100 noise removal it can’t be done.  You can reduce the noise considerably.  For me and my setup fiber did make a difference I could hear.  

Thanks. Glad to know that fiber makes a difference to your system. I highly doubt it but went ahead and order a fitlet3 as a NAA to try going fiber connection. Hopefully the fitlet3 will be here before end of year (ordered since April)

[botrytis]

I knew a group in MI, who was known for DBT - the Southeast Michigan Woofer and Tweeter Marching Society - or SMOOTUMS for short (don't know how that acronym came to be). They always tested systems this way. They did many, SPDIF vs USB - and the conclusion was SPDIF is way noisier than USB - they hated USB also.

 

I attribute this to how SPDIF has not basically changed since ~1985 (somewhere around there), when it was introduced while USB has been updated constantly.  I attribute this to Philip/SONY SPDIF development versus a cooperative industry group working on USB.

 

YMMW

[dericchan1]

2 minutes ago, botrytis said:

I knew a group in MI, who was known for DBT - the Southeast Michigan Woofer and Tweeter Marching Society - or SMOOTUMS for short (don't know how that acronym came to be). They always tested systems this way. They did many, SPDIF vs USB - and the conclusion was SPDIF is way noisier than USB - they hated USB also.

 

YMMW

SPDIF can be noisier than USB (based on many measurement reviews) but if they also hated USB so what do they use? lol

[botrytis]

18 minutes ago, dericchan1 said:

SPDIF can be noisier than USB (based on many measurement reviews) but if they also hated USB so what do they use? lol

 

Most of them were die hard Vinyl addicts - many are in their 80-90's if still alive. It has been a few years (2018 was the last time I saw them).

[dericchan1]

5 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

Most of them were die hard Vinyl addicts - many are in their 80-90's if still alive. It has been a few years (2018 was the last time I saw them).

It does not make much sense to me. If they were die hard vinyl addicts, why would they care about USB to a point they hate it? lol

[ecwl]

15 hours ago, frieddr said:

Hi - I have an Uptone Etheregen feeding an SoTM SMS 200 Ultra through an SOTM TxUSB Ultra with SOTM PSU to a Chord Qutest DAC. Which of the following would be the best investment to improve the chain: add used Chord mscaler; Replace Qutest with used TT2; add used SoTM sCLK-OCX10 (hard to find) to link to streamer and USB reclocker; replace the SoTM equipment with used Auralic Aries G2 (hard to find); replace Etheregen with Network Acoustics Eno.

As someone who still owns Chord Mojo, Hugo 2, M-Scaler and DAVE, I may have a slightly different take on this. Granted, I definitely haven't had the opportunity to hear TT2 unfortunately.

 

First, Chord reference sound is oddly through Toslink input because there is no electrical connection between your source and the DAC. This is almost never true for any other DAC as Toslink generally has too much jitter for most DACs to get optimal sound. If you have a new-ish portable laptop/tablet and feed it via USB into your Chord DAC when the tablet is not plugged into any power supplies (or external HDD with power supplies), you should get identical sound for USB and Toslink. Of course, you can tweak the USB sound by injecting more or less ground loop noise into the DAC and you may or may not like the sound better based on your taste. But that's not what I would recommend.

 

Hence, I really don't think you should replace Etheregen with Network Acoustics Eno or get SoTMs sCLK-OCX10.

 

Before upgrading, you really want to make sure that your Qutest is optimally setup so if your preamp doesn't clip, you should set the Qutest output voltage to 3V and if you hear clipping with your preamp, you should lower the voltage to 2V and sometimes even 1V to make sure you're hearing the best from the Qutest.

 

It is generally safe to say that everyone who upgraded from Qutest to TT2 are happy. At least according to those on the Head-Fi forums. So that upgrade is fairly safe.

 

M-Scaler is so individual dependent. As others have suggested that they prefer HQPlayer. I have also seen 1 in 20? owners of M-Scaler insist that they don't hear a difference with M-Scaler as it is likely that some people cannot hear the transient accuracy improvements or their ears are not tuned to detect it. On the other hand, people like me thinks that M-Scaler is the best upgrade ever. And even though I haven't tried the latest versions of HQPlayer or PGGB, I much prefer M-Scaler to the software solutions when I tried the earlier versions.

 

If I were you, I would wonder if there is something else in the rest of your analog chain you can upgrade first, as I think your digital system is quite sorted. I mean, what doesn't sound right to you now or what do you want to improve on?

 

And just for reference comparison, I would try playing music via a battery-powered laptop USB into the Qutest or Toslink into Qutest. And I would definitely make sure that I have the output voltage set to the highest possible without clipping.

 

Sometimes the oddest and smallest changes can make a huge difference to the sound. My audio components are in-between my speakers on a shelf. I recently added Symposium platforms/point pods underneath my components to reduce the vibrations and got a dramatic sound upgrade. So not all upgrades necessarily have to be on the digital  front.

 

 

 

[dericchan1]

7 minutes ago, ecwl said:

As someone who still owns Chord Mojo, Hugo 2, M-Scaler and DAVE, I may have a slightly different take on this. Granted, I definitely haven't had the opportunity to hear TT2 unfortunately.

 

First, Chord reference sound is oddly through Toslink input because there is no electrical connection between your source and the DAC. This is almost never true for any other DAC as Toslink generally has too much jitter for most DACs to get optimal sound. If you have a new-ish portable laptop/tablet and feed it via USB into your Chord DAC when the tablet is not plugged into any power supplies (or external HDD with power supplies), you should get identical sound for USB and Toslink. Of course, you can tweak the USB sound by injecting more or less ground loop noise into the DAC and you may or may not like the sound better based on your taste. But that's not what I would recommend.

 

Hence, I really don't think you should replace Etheregen with Network Acoustics Eno or get SoTMs sCLK-OCX10.

 

Before upgrading, you really want to make sure that your Qutest is optimally setup so if your preamp doesn't clip, you should set the Qutest output voltage to 3V and if you hear clipping with your preamp, you should lower the voltage to 2V and sometimes even 1V to make sure you're hearing the best from the Qutest.

 

It is generally safe to say that everyone who upgraded from Qutest to TT2 are happy. At least according to those on the Head-Fi forums. So that upgrade is fairly safe.

 

M-Scaler is so individual dependent. As others have suggested that they prefer HQPlayer. I have also seen 1 in 20? owners of M-Scaler insist that they don't hear a difference with M-Scaler as it is likely that some people cannot hear the transient accuracy improvements or their ears are not tuned to detect it. On the other hand, people like me thinks that M-Scaler is the best upgrade ever. And even though I haven't tried the latest versions of HQPlayer or PGGB, I much prefer M-Scaler to the software solutions when I tried the earlier versions.

 

If I were you, I would wonder if there is something else in the rest of your analog chain you can upgrade first, as I think your digital system is quite sorted. I mean, what doesn't sound right to you now or what do you want to improve on?

 

And just for reference comparison, I would try playing music via a battery-powered laptop USB into the Qutest or Toslink into Qutest. And I would definitely make sure that I have the output voltage set to the highest possible without clipping.

 

Sometimes the oddest and smallest changes can make a huge difference to the sound. My audio components are in-between my speakers on a shelf. I recently added Symposium platforms/point pods underneath my components to reduce the vibrations and got a dramatic sound upgrade. So not all upgrades necessarily have to be on the digital  front.

 

 

 

Agreed in full with your comments in particular perhaps the focus should be towards the analog side of things.

 

Qutest in itself is a decent dac (not suggesting a dac upgrade not worthwhile) but switching the digital playback from Roon to Hqplayer would be an affordable and significant step up in sq without any hardware changes.

 

 

[frieddr]

Thanks to dericchan1 and ecwl for the detailed responses.  I will definitely play with hqplayer. I've never tried it, but it is preloaded on my music server.  ECWL are you suggesting that the voltage on the qutest should be the lowest that works or the highest that works?  My preamp tolerates 1-3v, just changes the range of volume.  Thanks again. David 

[botrytis]

2 hours ago, dericchan1 said:

It does not make much sense to me. If they were die hard vinyl addicts, why would they care about USB to a point they hate it? lol

 

They were trying to be objectivists. Not your responsibility to understand. It is what they did EVERY meeting.

[creativepart]

My $.02... I have the SoTM SMS200 Ultra, the SP500 Power Supply and Chord Qutest powered by a Sbooster power supply. I feed the SMS200 Ultra via a separate low cost switch so, my setup is kind of similar to yours. It's sounds pretty good. But like you, I assume it could still be better.

 

I looked at a lot of the same things as you. I concluded that a used TT2 would "probably" be the best next step up. Either that or go to a HoloAudio Spring Level 3 DAC or similarly priced DAC.

 

I decided the least expensive thing to try was HQPlayer via Roon. It's a couple hundred dollars and it was easy to set up. You get a 30-day Free Trial but I like the sound improvement enough that I bought the license on day three of the trial.

 

I started with 708/32 PCM settings and an included filter that was developed to be a "software Mscaler" with a million taps. That worked really well and the sound was improved for a couple hundred dollars. Since then with some more trial and error I've switched the HQP settings to DSD256 and I like that even better.

 

I'm still convinced a DAC upgrade would improve things even more - and the TT2 or the Spring Level 3 or similar would be further improvement. But I'm happy enough at this point to hold right here for a while more.

[dericchan1]

36 minutes ago, creativepart said:

My $.02... I have the SoTM SMS200 Ultra, the SP500 Power Supply and Chord Qutest powered by a Sbooster power supply. I feed the SMS200 Ultra via a separate low cost switch so, my setup is kind of similar to yours. It's sounds pretty good. But like you, I assume it could still be better.

 

I looked at a lot of the same things as you. I concluded that a used TT2 would "probably" be the best next step up. Either that or go to a HoloAudio Spring Level 3 DAC or similarly priced DAC.

 

I decided the least expensive thing to try was HQPlayer via Roon. It's a couple hundred dollars and it was easy to set up. You get a 30-day Free Trial but I like the sound improvement enough that I bought the license on day three of the trial.

 

I started with 708/32 PCM settings and an included filter that was developed to be a "software Mscaler" with a million taps. That worked really well and the sound was improved for a couple hundred dollars. Since then with some more trial and error I've switched the HQP settings to DSD256 and I like that even better.

 

I'm still convinced a DAC upgrade would improve things even more - and the TT2 or the Spring Level 3 or similar would be further improvement. But I'm happy enough at this point to hold right here for a while more.

I liked the improvement in hqplayer so much I bought the full license after the first 30min trial.  😂 

[frieddr]

Thanks?  I'm definitely going to try upscaling on hq player. Rob Watts forcefully insisted on head fi forum that a PSU cannot improve the sound of a Qutest. I have the chord wall wort PSU plugged into a filtered outlet to suppress noise that might enter the rest of my system from the cheap switch mode psu.

[dericchan1]

2 minutes ago, frieddr said:

Thanks?  I'm definitely going to try upscaling on hq player. Rob Watts forcefully insisted on head fi forum that a PSU cannot improve the sound of a Qutest. I have the chord wall wort PSU plugged into a filtered outlet to suppress noise that might enter the rest of my system from the cheap switch mode psu.

Rob also insists the qutest has sufficient usb isolation built-in but inserting an intona to the chain still further improves on the noise floor 

[creativepart]

While many swear the PSU upgrade made a huge impact, I have to say I didn't notice much difference. Mostly, everyone says it's so. So, maybe it is and I just don't hear it.

 

Rob also says that Toslink is best to him - and I know for a fact that in my system this is far from true.

[ecwl]

3 hours ago, frieddr said:

Thanks to dericchan1 and ecwl for the detailed responses.  I will definitely play with hqplayer. I've never tried it, but it is preloaded on my music server.  ECWL are you suggesting that the voltage on the qutest should be the lowest that works or the highest that works?  My preamp tolerates 1-3v, just changes the range of volume.  Thanks again. David 

So I have found that some preamps specify that their input sensitivity is only 1V but can truly accept 3V. But some preamps would say they can accept 3V but you can hear the clipping in loud passages at 3V from the Qutest. So sadly, this is something you have to test with musical materials that is likely to use the maximum dynamic range and then play it back through your system at 1V vs 3V to see if you hear any clipping/distortion at 3V during the loud passages. But yes, you should set your Qutest to the highest voltage that doesn't clip your preamp to your ears.

 

As for HQPlayer, it's free to try so if it is easy to try it in your setup, why not? It is quite a bit cheaper than M-Scaler.