Anybody here upgrade from Chord Qutest DAC"

With that ear 868l pre there is no sense going with the TT2...  Do you need an additional embedded pre in the loop? Keep the Qutest and add an Mscaler or go to the Dave...  You don't say what your streamer is...  Maybe an upgrade there would help...  I have a Lumen U1 mini with my Qutest and am very happy with the pair in my system streaming Qobuz Studio Premier...

Definitely don't need another pre, that's true. I'll look into that aspect of TT2 features.

I am super curious about the mscaler, but also about non chord DACs. 

I use a hifiberry digi + for streaming.  Does top notch qobuz beautifully most of the time. Cheap and from what I can tell excellent roon endpoint. While I can't say that's not room for upgrade there, I want to see what other DACs might do first. 

I tried qutest and hugo tt2. Hugo delivers lots more depth and detail. The clarity and precision of the bass was most noticable.  I am saving for the m scaler, rather than considering chord Dave and intend on using it for multiple digital sources.

Both the Qutest and Hugo TT2 have a 10 element pulse array design...
The Qutest has 49,152 16FS WTA 1 filter...  The Hugo TT2 has 98,304 taps...  Dave has 164,000 taps and a 20 element Pulse Array...  The MScaler takes either the Qutest, Hugo TT2 or Dave up to 1,015,808 WTA taps...

There is some software available with/for Roon that can Upscale similar to the MScaler called HQPlayer...  I think there is a free trial for it...  Although not exactly the same filtering as WTA it might give you a sense of what a bunch more taps might sound like with your current DAC...

Also, if you can do a little software building there are mods to SoX and FLAC which allow similar upscaling and filtering capabilities for free...

Other non-Chord DACS will not have the same timing precision which may or may not be a good thing depending on your ear/brain/system/room...  Good luck in your quest...

These DAC technologies are absurd, in the best way. I know the difference between 10 pounds and 20 pounds, but 10 elements and taps vs 20 and 20, I don’t think so.

i like the HQ Player idea, though. Never heard of it.

Interesting about the potential loss of timing precision with non chord DACs. I hope that’s not always the case.  But cool to keep that in mind.  So many other highly regarded DACs out there,