To Hans Wetzel,
Your review of the Technics’s SU-G700 integrated amplifier-DAC was great and prompted me to order it today. Can I ask how you would compare the DAC in this amplifier to the Chord Qutest, which I already own? Your response would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Roni Kalsi
United Kingdom
I really enjoyed my time with the SU-G700, and I hope you will, too, Roni. As a reminder, because of the way the SU-G700 amplifies signals, it digitizes all of its analog inputs using a Burr-Brown PCM1804 analog-to-digital converter (ADC), then converts them to analog basically right at the speaker outputs. There is not a typical DAC in it like you would find with most integrated amplifiers. So while you certainly could hook up your Chord Qutest to one of the amp’s analog inputs, that would result in the signal being converted from digital to analog in the Qutest, back to digital again at the input of the SU-G700, and then back to analog once more at the very end of the SU-G700’s signal path. As a matter of signal integrity and fidelity, I wouldn’t advise that on principle, which is why I suspect it makes the most sense to leave the Chord DAC on the sidelines going forward. And to answer your question directly, I don’t have any experience with Chord’s Qutest, so I can’t say how it might sound run through one of the SU-G700’s analog inputs, nor how it would compare to using the Technics’ digital inputs directly.. . . Hans Wetzel
