No such thing as a dramatic sound difference between solid state amps. It’s just power. You should only hear differences between SS amps if you have hard-to-drive cans/speakers and one amp has sufficient power while another does not. Or if there are build issues with an amp.
SS tech is so well-establish and easy to produce flawlessly these days that it is possible to get great clean consistent power for pennies on the watt. The Anni is slick, and matches nicely with the Qutest, but for the money, I dunno. That said, I think for most audiophiles, myself included, gear is 75% function and 25% jewelry. I’ve been known to buy an expensive cable or two simply because they look and feel great, while simultaneously not believing the stuff about how it will “completely upgrade the sound of my headphone”…
Anyway, regarding the difference you’re hearing… Chord doesn’t use off-the-rack chips, they engineer the sound of each DAC model individually, with custom implemented chips… FPGA, to be precise (Field Programmable Gate Array). This creates a greater range within the Chord DAC house sound, from model line to model line, then you might find with other manufacturers using off-the-rack chips. You probably just like the sound of the DAC implementation in whatever Chord model you have more than the DAC implementation in the TT2. I’m not a fan of the TT2 sound either, much prefer the Mojo.
