I will say that, for me, the Qutest does a better job out of the box than the Ares + Iris 12th handling DSD. I know it converts it internally to PCM (at least I think I know that from what I’ve read), but if you take each of these out of the box and feed a DSD signal in, I think the output is significantly cleaner and the soundstage is much more coherent with the Qutest. You might also look at the Dayzee DAC, which handles DSD directly with AKM’s DSD Direct (DSDD) mode, bypassing most of its other processing. It does okay with PCM, but it uses a minimum phase filter for PCM that cannot be changed. I did a big post on all this recently in the Dayzee thread I created when it came out if you want more info…
With my Ares, I’m now converting all DSD to PCM. I had been using Roon for this, but I recently converted to HQPlayer. The learning curve is a bit on the steep side, but after a couple of days playing around with it, the difference in sound quality is fantastic. This applies to all 3 of these DACs, IMHO. I am using 768 PCM for Ares and Qutest (Ares is supposed to support one step higher at 1536, but I get noise and signal breakup no matter how I try to connect the device, so I have to back off to 768 and let the DAC do whatever it does to the signal from there, which still sounds good. Honestly, I use the oversampling mode on the Ares 12th, because, despite what they say, Goldensound pretty much proved that they don’t have true NOS, so there is some kind of processing either way, and I’d rather just use their upsampling for that last little step, because it does genuinely sound pretty good.
HQPlayer has a free trial, so it may be worth checking out. The thing is, pretty much all DACs are going to be better at one or the other of PCM or DSD, and when you convert using software in a very thoughtful and powerful way, the results can be magic. I agree that other conversion schemes leave a lot to be desired, but just think of HQPlayer as taking over for the first stage of conversion and doing what your DAC would do anyway, but instead of doing it with a $30 chip that runs at 10 or 20 mHz, it does it with your 200x more powerful computer CPU or even more powerful GPU if you want to push into exotic conversions. It really functions more like an M Scaler - not exactly the same, but similar concept. In any case, it was a pain to get started, but I can’t imagine ever going back to not using it after hearing what it can do for every DAC I have tried with it… Also, if you try it, the default settings for the filters and dithering and stuff are pretty good right out of the box, so you don’t have to get into the complexity of tweaking it much to get an idea for the improvement it can make…
If you don’t want to mess around with any of this, I think the Qutest is a good way to go. There are other DACs that can handle DSD in a bit-perfect way. If you look on the Audiophile Style forum, there is a thread for bit-perfect DSD DACs, because these are generally considered the cream of the crop for HQPlayer enthusiasts. Dayzee will fall into that bracket (though only after an upgrade to the USB card firmware, again, check my other thread if you want to know more). The way it handles PCM comes down to your taste. Some people prefer minimum phase filters, but I seriously doubt that people who find the Chord sound appealing are generally going to prefer minimum phase, because you will get time smearing and loss of soundstage, and I’m not really sure what the benefit is - to my ears it’s just a slight degradation to sound quality relative to linear phase. It’s also worth noting here that DSD64 can still benefit from oversampling. It is roughly equivalent in resolution to an 88.2/24 PCM, which still definitely benefits from oversampling. In the case of DSD, it allows the noise shaper a bit more room to work and push the high frequency noise farther up the spectrum, at least that’s my understanding of it. So the Qutest converting to PCM and oversampling may still be helping it. For the Dayzee, I’m converting everything to DSD and letting HQPlayer upsample it to DSD256, which is the native frequency of the chip inside. It also handles base 44.1 and 48 kHz DSD, so you don’t have to convert 48/24, 96/24 and 192/24 to the traditional DSD formats, which are based in 44.1, so you don’t end up adding error when converting non-44.1 tracks to DSD with a chip like this.
Considering that most DACs either have conversion internally or a poorly implemented version of whichever type of conversion is not their strong suit (like DSD on the Ares), I think unless you’re going to us HQPlayer, it’s nice to have a DAC that you can just feed any signal to and get a fantastic output. The Qutest is just that. If I couldn’t use HQPlayer for some reason, I would not have any quibbles about just feeding it my native DSD64 files and enjoying the music, it sounds fantastic.
I was afraid this would turn into a little TED Talk, and it totally did, but I hope it’s helpful!
