How did you like the move? For what it’s worth I ordered a Bliss to see how it goes.
TL;DR - I liked it but, in retrospect, I'm not sure it was a day/night difference.
The Oor/Hypsos combo gets louder. There's more headroom for Susvara and the AB-1266. There are a million voices out there touting them as the cat's meow. But to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure the hype is real. I've no major complaints with the combo. They sound great together and I've got enough power - unless I'm watching a movie off of something like Netflix, in which case, I find myself craving more cowbell. I even had the Wandla to complete the set, but it never felt like the Wandla was worth the $3k price tag.
I A/B'd the Wandla and the Chord Qutest back and forth, which was really clunky. The Oor has a switcher for RCA and XLR. Every time I changed DACs, I had to switch them on Tidal. I would hear a section of music, pause, make the two switches, rewind, and hear it all over again. (I also had to adjust the volume because Wandla has a volume control wheel and it took some adjusting to match the two devices, especially with start/stop/switch/switch/start/stop/switch/switch. I didn't have a second Hypsos (or one of those bricks allowing me to share it between the Oor and the Wandla) so maybe I missed the finer nuances. What I heard was very nice but I'm not sure it was any better than the A90 or A90D - just louder.
After a seemingly endless amount of going back and forth, I convinced myself that the Wandla had a slight edge in clarity, which could easily have been placebo, especially since I also came away with the impression that the Qutest had a little more meat on its bones downstairs. Both impressions could be created from a slight disparity in tone. How many headphone listeners have been fooled into thinking their cans had more "detail" because of a slight difference in treble? Without test data, there's no way to know. I also should have swapped the inputs to rule out any differences based on which input I ran the DAC through. Opportunities missed.
I sent back the Wandla, which have features galore over the Qutest, because I didn't care about so many of those features. I don't need an LED display. I don't need a remote. I didn't care for any of the filters either DAC brought to the table. I'm not sure I buy into all the Chord hype about the taps. What motivated me to stick with the Qutest was the way it made me aware of artifacts in tracks I'd listened to for decades. I'd listen to a track and out of the blue, I'd hear something I hadn't noticed before. That may or may not be a result of resolution or timing. I really don't know. When I'd run A/B on the two DACs, I hardly heard any difference between them, just that slightest of tonal differences squeezed out of a very flawed attempt to A/B the two.
The reason I kept the Qutest was that I had these "aha" moments, when not A/Bing it, just listening to music, just enjoying it. I never had any similar experiences with the Wandla, so there was no compelling reason to keep it. I was a little bummed because, from a certain aesthetic, it would have been cool to have sported the triple stack of the Wandla/Oor/Hypsos. The only thing I care about is the subjective listening experience. I'm not an engineer. I have nobody to impress. I like noticing little stuff I didn't know was there. On that measure, the Qutest periodically delivers (for whatever reason), so I kept it, despite its odd shape and size and all those goofy little buttons.
As for the Oor/Hypsos vs something like the A90/D90 combo, Ferrum makes a product that delivers more power, enabling me to comfortably enjoy the Susvara for music, if not for streaming movies off of sites like Netflix. If you have something other than the Susvara or the AB-1266, Topping's A90SE/D90D provides one hell of a bang for the buck. Most headphones lovers would be more than satisfied. I had a lucky moment when I was able to fetch these Ferrum products, and I'm reasonably happy with my purchases, but the hype cloud is always larger than the mountaintop.
