Does anyone using the Qutest hear a difference with the different filters?
I am not sure I can . I tried switching about a little between them all at first and could not really hear a difference ,
I used it on the white filter for 7 months and decided to switch it to the red filter as that’s probably the most different .
Again I was not sure I could hear any difference
I have had it on red filter for about a month or so now , so decided to switch back to the white …….I think I may now hear a difference . It is a small difference but I think I prefer the red filter .
I know and understand this may be my ears playing tricks on me
I tried the Qutest for a few weeks and thought I heard a bit of a difference in the filters, mainly between white and red. The fact you have to cycle through four makes it hard to compare them. In the frequency response graph in this review you see white and orange are identical and green and red are identical, but these 'identical' pairs are not adjacent in the cycle so it's a bit hard to test for any subjective difference - seems quite convenient for Chord to have arranged them that way!
But the adjacent changes were noticeable. I didn't really appreciate any but white (claimed to be the most true to the source), unless there was something about the track that benefitted from the treble reduction on green/red, e.g. old recording. I think I found one track I thought I preferred orange for. If you like red, you might have more treble than you like coming from downstream components, so you might find green to your taste too.
However, bear in mind it's easy to think there's a difference when your entire room is lit up a different colour. The filters on my E50 seemed to have differences until I did a blind test and couldn't tell them apart. That's a choice of simply 1, 2 or 3, yet seeing the numbers evidently has some synesthetic influence on the sound.
And the fact that I liked, for example, the red glow in my room while listening to old jazz records... probably indicates some major influence on me that was nothing to do with the sound! I should've tried the blind test with the Qutest filters when I was demoing it - perhaps you could try that yourself.