Physically connect a Bluesond Node 2i to a downline, stand alone Chord Qutest DAC

Hilly230, set the output voltage on the Qutest to 3 volts and see if it still sounds the same...

hilly230, you don’t, by any chance, have MQA in mix do you??? I would expect some shenanigans going on if your source material has been tainted by MQA as the Node does MQA processing and the Chord Quest does not support MQA...

I am not saying MQA sounds bad, just different horses for courses... My Quest sounds head and shoulders better in all ways then my ex Burr Brown DAC...  Also moved on to a Lumin U1 mini...

@hilly230, Glass is better than plastic for Toslink... Coaxial is susceptible to RFI... Wifi may give you some physical isolation at the cost of increased RFI... Ethernet cable is pretty clean at cat 6 and above...

I use Wifi to/from my laptop to my local router, wired ethernet from the router to the streamer and USB to the Qutest which has galvanic isolation plus some other trix Rob Watts designed in...

For testing, and to be fair, I would turn off all MQA processing in the Node and use known quality and resolution source files to compare the two DACs... I, and many others, are suspicious of any source material from Tidal now a days...

I also wonder if your amp is doing something to the signals...  Maybe digitizing the incoming analogue for further internal processing?