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OldBigEars

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  1. View Classified Sonore OpticalRendu Lite (Roon only) Excellent condition throughout. Sounds superb. All original packaging and accessories. Reliable seller - check my Audiogon ratings janehamble. Seller OldBigEars Date 12/12/23 Price 975.00 USD Category Music Servers / Streamers  
  2. View Classified CHORD QUTEST DAC Excellent condition throughout. Sounds superb. All original packaging and accessories. Reliable seller - check my Audiogon ratings janehamble. Seller OldBigEars Date 12/12/23 Price 1,275.00 USD Category Digital to Analog Converters  
  3. Thanks for providing your experience comparing the Douk with at least two of the leading DDC contenders in the $500-700 class. As you've tested both, did you have a preference between Iris and SRC-DX? Note that I wouldn't be feeding either with upsampled data. Concerning the Douk, I haven't really found anything resembling a growling in the bass but ultimately you can only really hear these things when you directly compare with other pieces of equipment. In isolation, it sounds pretty darn good feeding my Qutest.
  4. My experience is that is does. And using the Optical input instead of USB, even more so. You end up retaining the 'hyper detail' of the Qutest but adding a whole heap of musicality. I won't try to guess how it compares to Denafrips Pontus or Venus but I can safely say it has improved my Qutest experience beyond belief.
  5. Depends on one's definition of 'truly high end'. I just upgraded from an iPower X to an SBooster / Ultra 11 and the improvement is stark. No doubt you could take it further with a more exotic PS. Someone here mentioned that the Qutest + Sean Jacobs' PS is quite special. My advice is to avoid using the USB, and also upgrade the PS at least to SBooster level. But keeping the total cost in mind, the Qutest with these upgrades would need to rival the Denafrips Venus, rather than the Pontus.
  6. I use the Douk U2 Pro, connected via a Curious short link USB to my OpticalRendu. The Douk is connected by an AQ Cinnamon Optical cable to my Qutest. Adding the Douk DDC made a truly stunning difference, compared with a USB direct connection from the oR to the Qutest. Step 2....last week I added an SBooster power supply. Another significant jump in SQ in my system. I'm more than satisfied with both of these investments. Obviously I would be curious to hear if fancier DDC's sound better than the $56 Douk. One would hope so, at 10-30 times the cost - your call as to whether the improvements offer proportional value.
  7. I owe you all a follow up....I didn't want to post until I'd concluded all my testing and really tracked down the source of the problem, which was...the speaker cable / connection. It had nothing to do with my Qutest after all and all is now working normally.
  8. Yup 192K max for the Douk. Not an issue for me, but this may be a drawback for some folks. I'm curious of course to know how much improvement the optional upgraded clocks would deliver to the Douk (if any).
  9. I'm pretty sure it's a good old-fashioned loose connection on the red input. Not an issue with the amp. Wiggling the IC fixes it temporarily. I need to get my Qutest back to Chord asap. Concerning the gain/sensitivity with my Belles, I use my Chord at iV for best results, enabling less volume attenuation.
  10. New problem with my Qutest......out of the blue, one of the output channels has developed an intermittent fault, resulting in no sound coming from one speaker. If I fiddle around with the RCA interconnect, take it off, put it back on....it goes away and the DAC sounds normal with both channels working. My Qutest is 18 months old. This is surprising and disappointing given the brick-like character of the DAC. I'll be in touch with the retailer or Chord this week. My interconnects are AQ Water - quite stiff and heavy. Anyone else out there experienced something like this with their Qutest?
  11. For the record, the core of my listening is 'modern jazz, blues, soul'. I frequently listen to acoustic artists and occasionally I'll dig out some classic 70's rock. On rare occasions, some classical too. My system loves the former genre as well as anything acoustic. It's probably not optimal for hard rock.
  12. I'm afraid the author's assessment of the Topping D90 is throwing me off. I bought and lived with this DAC for a month and tried every possible configuration, including the highly recommended DSD 256. Personally...I really didn't enjoy it at all. Yes I can agree that it extracted an etched kind of hyper-detail, but I never found it made coherent sense of the music. I wanted to love this $699 DAC as it would have saved me a lot of money. But I sent it back and haven't missed it for a moment. I replaced it with a Chord Qutest, which I enjoy orders of magnitude more than the Topping. I recall that this writer expressed his preference for the Pontus over the Chord. Which only goes to prove how subjective and system-dependent this whole hobby is.
  13. Not sure what you mean by a new disk. My oR has a small disk, of course. Never knew the STi5 has one too. I’ll take a look tonight.
  14. I’d certainly like to try repeating the upgrade process but sadly my STi5 no longer connects to the internet or my home network.
  15. Vincent, it sounds like you and I have had an identical experience (horrible) with this software upgrade on the Sonic Transporter. Like you, I have no clue as to why my STi5 no longer connects to my home network. I called Andrew this morning and he suggested that 'there must be something wrong with my STi5' so I should send it back to him for analysis / repair. Aside from the obvious pain of being without my primary music source for an extended period, I'm having a very hard time understanding how and why it went from performing absolutely normally one minute, and then it's suddenly non-functional as soon as I did the 2.8 update. I'll refrain from expressing how frustrating this is. My instinct tells me that this must be some kind of IP / networking cock-up. Unfortunately it's very hard finding information that normal human beings can understand to resolve networking issues. Basically, we're buggered. I shall probably continue to try futzing around and will also see if anyone on the Roon Community site has any useful advice. @R1200CL, yes I used the correct IP address, and the sonicorbiter.com site has no solutions
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