Comparing Chord Qutest Dac with the Built in Dac in Lumin T3 Streamer

Such a turn off.....    just to say former Lumin dealer is a bottom feeder type of move.  Is Lumin bad?   No.... I find posts like these akin to free advertising .   No place for that here , is there ?

There are a number of other dealers who contribute here and it's not a turn off.  It's often good honest, valuable info.     

I had U1 Mini / Qutest combo and in my opinion it will be tough to beat. What you’re looking to do is most likely a sideways move. I would upgrade either the streamer or the dac then upgrade the other component later on. Keep it separated. Also, if you haven’t tried a really good USB cable in the current setup, you are not even at full potential yet.

I compared the Qutest a few years back when I was cross shopping the T2. Initially I found the Qutest to be very dynamic, but in repeated A/B it grew fatiguing to my ears on most recordings. I went for the T2 which I still own.

The T3 is a nice improvement. I ended up recently with an X1 which is absolutely fantastic and cross shopped that with the Bartok, preferring the X1. It is liquid and compares nicely when playing high res files against my high end Kuzma Stabi R vinyl setup.

Lumin customer support is second to none, and it works flawlessly to update. The Lumin app is good, but I prefer the interface of Roon.

I have not compared T3 to Qutest but have compared the T2. This is not a fair comparison. Tonally similar. The T2 sounded much bigger than the Qutest in terms of image height and width. Qutest has the edge in terms of depth and the T2 had a small edge in terms of detail. No one I have heard is better than Chord between the speakers in terms of image depth.

All around, most people would probably be biased toward the T2/T3 but it is also a $5K unit vs a $1600 unit.

A fairer comparison would be to put the T3 up against the TT2. I think the TT2 is probably the better DAC in that scenario as It is more detailed and maintains its edge in terms of soundstage depth and the overall image is bigger. But then, it is a $5500 unit without streamer vs $5K unit with streamer so again, you would expect this.

An interesting alternative would be the Weiss 204 as it is priced in the middle at $3.5K and if you added it with your U2 Mini, it might be as good if not better than the T3.  .

Full disclosure. I am a Chord and Weiss dealer. I don’t sell Lumin but have had multiple Lumin devices in on trade.

@verdantaudio 

I have a Qutest and I was looking at the Weiss 204 earlier today as I'm looking for a DAC with balanced outputs.  I haven't heard any Weiss DACs before but I'm curious after reading many positive reviews for what that's worth.  How does the Qutest compare in your experience?  I'm using an iFi Zen Stream with Roon for now.  Looking for a new streamer as well.