Dayzee - Flagship DAC from Geshelli Labs

[Dnguyen926]

@Promee I see the Qutest in your list of DAC tagged.

How is the Qutest vs. Dayzee? I want to upgrade my DAC and the Qutest is one of my top choices.

 

[Patswalker]

@Promee I see the Qutest in your list of DAC tagged.

How is the Qutest vs. Dayzee? I want to upgrade my DAC and the Qutest is one of my top choices.

I had the Qutest. LOVED it. Size wise there is nothing that comes even close to doing what it does.

A while back I got the J2. At the time I had the Qutest and to me the Qutest was a different beast than the J2. Better in all ways. When I got the J2S dac and put in the Sparkos SS2590 opamps though, that to me in my system that and the Qutest so close that I sold the Qutest. There were areas where the Qutest was a bit better for the specific listening I do and in the specific system I have but I had to really really really concentrate and listen hard to notice them. Others might have a different expeirnce with their systems if they have a kamillion dollar hyper revealing super system, but I sold the Qutest because to me they were SO close that it was almost superfuous to have both. I don't like having two versions of the same thing in my collection and I don't like having two very similar sounding things in my system. To be clear I am not saying the J2S with SS2590 is objectively better than the Qutest. I am saying that to my ears in my system they were similar enought that I saw no point in having them both. I love the Geshelli family and what they do for hifi enthusiants on a teacher's budget like myself so my opinions are qite flavored by that, and also I would make more money selling the Qutest so I did.

I got the J3 eventually and loved it even more. Not night and day from my previous opiunion of the J2S I described but just a bit better in every way. Then I saved up and saved up and got the Dayzee. I then put the Sparkos 2590 opamps in. This to me was WAY better. The Dayzee to me took everything I loved about the J2s and the J3 and elevated it to a whole next dimension. I do not have a Qutest with me now to test it but I can't begin to tell you how much I love love love the Dayzee. From a sonic standpoint it's mind bending to me. The J2S, J3, and Qutest were fun and great but the Dayzee to me is irriplaceable. From a use standpoint it's untouchable. What I mean by that is that I have two single ended tube amps on a rack in my listeneing area next to my desk, one giant class A balanced heaphone amp on a rack in my listening area next to my desk, one small single ended Fosi Audio speaker amp on my desk, one smaller balanced class A headphone amp on my desk, I have all that connected to the Dayzee and I even have one more available single ended output available on the back of the Dayzee if I want to connect anything else. They dayzee can accept like a billion digital inputs, can even act as a digital passthrough if you have some other dac that works well with toslink or coax input, it does a billion things. Like I said I don't have the Qutest with me to test but experinceing how close my experince with the Qutest was to the J2S and how much wildly better the Dayzee is than the J2s (with the specific opamps I am using) I can only asume that I would feel that the Dayzee would sound way better than the Qutest in my system. I am only assuming there, I want to be clear. Use case wise though, the Dayzee is infinatelty better than the Qutest for me in every way imaginable.

If you are looking for the Qutest vs Dayzee comparison, the Qutest for its size is honesly one of the most amazing devices available. I LOVE it. I love all things Chord. They are amazing. They deserve all the praise. That's for sure. Love love love. the Qutest though is designed to do one thing. The Dayzee is designed to be a digital hub to connect to many things. Two very different design intentions, two different adventures. I would look at use case and avaiable area as your determining factors. The Dayzee is GIANT but I have never in my life heard anything like it. It singe handedly rebuilt my conception of what a delta sigma chip based dac can offer. Even at it's MSRP buying new I can't imagine a better dac. The Qutest I would only buy used. I don't think it is the best or really worth it to me in my system at the MSRP buying new.

I love my Dayzee in my system like Pooh Bear loves honey. LOVE. It's irreplaceble. The Qutest to me is great but it doesn't do anything special enough to deserve a permement place on my racks.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask anything else!

 

[Patswalker]

Dayzee looks like a real winner! Love the plexi + wood aesthetic, and your impressions make it sound like a beast of a DAC. Looking forward to hearing more comparisons!

In a lot of ways it is for sure. Small and compact it is not. If the space is available it's wildly amazing. I have it next to my Yggi OG. It's basically that size, just a tad tad bigger. But like the Yggi OG it just does things other dacs don't.

 

[Patswalker]

Hey all! I just got a new solid wood chassis for my Dayzee. This means I have my old wood chassis sitting around. It is Cherry wood, it if beautiful, and it has a cutout with plexi on top. The reason I got a new chassis is because the batch of plexi that mine came from was a different batch than what originally came with the Dayzee. My plexi batch was more rigid than the plexi it was tested with so when the wood expands as it warms up as wood does, the plexi would bow up a bit.

Obviously this issue has totally nothing zero to do with how amazing the dac is, I've honestly sold like 90% of my gear because it is so good. I'm posting here to see if anyone wants my old chassis and plexi. It's a large item and it takes up a lot of room in my living space so I wanted to offer it up to someone here if they want/need it. Photos are attached.

I don't care about a price. I just don't want to pay shipping. If you want to throw in a little donation for a cup of coffee or two I wouldn't hate you, but if you just pay shipping I'd happily send this out to you. I just don't want to trash this beautiful wood but I am going to have to if nobody takes it. I have no use for it as the new chassis replaced it and I don't have the extra space for it to not be annoying if I keep it.

Private message me and we can sort it all out.

 

[Promee]

@Promee I see the Qutest in your list of DAC tagged.

How is the Qutest vs. Dayzee? I want to upgrade my DAC and the Qutest is one of my top choices.

Sorry for the delayed response! If you search on Head-Fi, you'll see I actually did a detailed comparison of them, also including the Topping E70 Velvet and Denafrips Ares 12th. I stand by them as written - in terms of pure sound quality out of the box, I think the Qutest wins.

I think this is because I am a sucker for timbre, and the Dayzee uses a minimum phase filter when playing back PCM, so it is lively with transients and leading edges of notes, but it loses a little detail and refinement versus the Qutest when playing PCM. If you are more into macrodynamics and slam, the Dayzee might be your better choice. Also, in terms of convenience, there is no contest with the range of outputs of the Dayzee if you want to listen with a friend on another amp.

With that being said, I have been using HQPlayer recently, and the Dayzee is incredibly well-suited for use with it. Geno confirmed that it uses the DSD Direct feature of the AK4499EQ. This means that the DAC skips oversampling and goes straight to D -> A conversion. This means no minimum-phase filter, I can use whatever filter I want in HQPlayer and convert to DSD for output, and the DAC basically leaves it alone, just makes it into analog. So you get all the advantage of the excellent op amps and overall design and convenience without the disadvantage of using my less-preferred PCM filter.

So, now that I'm using HQPlayer, the Dayzee is my favorite DAC, and the Ares 12th + Iris 12th is runner up, with Qutest coming in third. They all sound better with HQPlayer correctly configured than they do out of the box, but the ceiling is significantly higher with the Dayzee (and Ares + Iris) than the Qutest. Ares 12th also has hardware DSD conversion, whereas Qutest resamples everything internally to PCM 705.6, so it is best to feed it that directly from HQPlayer, but the Qutest is going to do its own filtering and conversion internally no matter what you give it, starting with PCM 705.6 just skips the first phase, which is somewhat beneficial if you prefer the sound of a different filter from the massive HQPlayer list over the (admittedly good) one that is in the Qutest by default.

Whenever I get around to writing more about this, I'll put it in that thread, but just in case anyone here is thinking of using HQPlayer for DSD with the Dayzee, I would recommend setting it to a multiple of 44.1 kHz. Technically the Dayzee can handle DSD in multiples of 44.1 (standard) and 48 (non-standard), but switching between the two on the fly causes some very brief, but loud and jarring sounds. It is also my understanding that the clock used by the AK4499EQ is optimized for multiples of 44.1 and actually resamples base 48 kHz content internally, so better to just have HQPlayer do that and stick with 44.1 based output. Of course, that may vary by implementation, and I have that information second-hand, so take with the appropriate grains of salt. In any case, I have mine set to 44.1 kHz and DSD256 - it can technically receive DSD512, but I think it might actually down-sample within the chip, and there are actually disadvantages in terms of dynamic range, modulator, etc. of going too high with DSD, so 256 x 44.1 kHz seems to be a great sweet-spot for this DAC.

TL;DR - out of box, I would pick Qutest; with HQPlayer, I would pick Dayzee; and HQPlayer is a rabbit hole, but once you get it dialed in, it is a massive sonic upgrade.