The overwhelming takeaway from my time with the Qutest is that it has a wonderfully organic presentation and musical ability that would be hard to beat at this price. The Qutest not only proves Rob Watts’ prowess once again but Chord's ability to make something so small sound so good. The Chord Electronics Qutest DAC is available now for £1,195.

If you don’t mind its quirky design, Chord Qutest is a great-sounding product, especially if you like clean and orderly-sounding devices. The only thing I’m not that fond of is that it’s still priced at around 1450€ or $1700, but for that price, you get a cheap switching power supply that’s limiting its performance.

Over the course of the last 2 months, it has become my ‘go-to’ desktop DAC. It sounds brilliant with just about any desktop amp I have paired it with thus far. I would not classify the Qutest as dead neutral though. There are some subtle accents on the low-end body and treble presence that mark it as being slightly different from the Hugo 2 also.