Need help choosing a new DAC

Buy a Denafrips Ares 2-$800.  

Way too many choices.  Just pull the trigger and get one.  Then like the rest of us, put it up for sale and move up the food chain.  Do it once or twice, and your significant other will think you are hooked on fentanyl.  Trust me on this:  I’m now using the Brinkmann Nyquist DAC.

Benchmark dacs sound great and look at used Dacs here on Agon and get a great one for 30-50% off. Mytek, Ayre, Benchmark you cant go wrong. Read Stereophile Dac reviews which will clear things up some. 

I’ve had a Chord Qutest for a while and recently bought an MDHT Orchid because I was curious how an R2R with tube output would compare to a Delta Sigma FPGA. It was much closer than I thought it would be. I didn’t use the stock tube for long on the Orchid, opting for an adapter and a NOS Amperex 6DJ8. It gave it a little more body. There’s a thread all about tube rolling Orchids that might help you tailor your preferred sound. The biggest differences to me were the Orchid seemed a little more rolled off at the top, but not in a way that made it sound incorrect. I actually ended up changing from the incisive to the warm filter on the Qutest. Before hearing the Orchid I hadn’t even considered it. The Qutest still seems a little more detailed and with a slightly larger soundstage. With some hi-res tracks off Qobuz the Orchid got confused and emphasized some tape hiss from old masters. If I limited Qobuz to redbook the Orchid was actually a little quieter than the Qutest for the same tracks. Very minor, but the whole reason I got it was to compare. Though I plan on keeping both, if I had to give up one I’d keep the Qutest. I think I have a bias toward detail. Comparing the two DACs made me realize this. I do have the Orchid connected to my CD transport though. My point is you may not figure out what you want until you try it. I think if I had bought the Orchid first, I would have been disappointed by the Qutest, but mostly as a value proposition. Need to save up my nickels to try a Sonnet Morpheus next.

I’m a diehard Yggdrasil fan, and listen to a lot of live Dead recordings on Quboz. This is also not a flavor of the month DAC, and is made in America to boot. Schiit stands behind their products, too.