I haven’t heard all the good stuff, but I guess that your gear comes as close as possible to my preferences. Have you tested other dacs to your Stax gear. I’m thinking on Dave and other high end dacs.
It seems that synergy is very important. That’s why it’s hard to buy anything without testing with the gear it will play with. There are a few dacs on my radar. Qutest is the one I’m hoping will sound best with my gear in the price range. But Mytek Brooklyn+ and NuPrime Dac-10 has also been recommended to me.
I've done a lot of research on DACs. (And owned a dozen, but the Chord 2Qute is the only one so far that cost more than $1,000.) The only ones I am still interested in (granted, this is based on online info, not auditions, aside from a few others I happened to hear) are the Chord DAVE, Blu MkII (a DDC that needs to be paired with a DAC, but basically in the same "category" as a DAC for this discussion), Qutest, and one of the upcoming DX amps (which will apparently be a DAC, power amp, and preamp all in one), as well as the Audio-gd R2R 7. My best friend recently bought the last one, so I should be able to spend time with it in the future to decide how I like it.
My priority is objective fidelity. If you get the best-measuring DAC you can at the price, that should bring the best out of your system, making synergy obsolete in my eyes. (Unless you are looking to color the sound to a great extent.)
(Side note: I am a strong proponent of parametric equalizers. Tonal balance is somewhat of a moot issue once you become proficient with those.)
What impresses me most about Chord is how they surpass all other DACs (including ones that cost up to six figures) in terms of measured performance.
Obviously, the DAVE has a better power supply, more pulse array elements, more advanced tap lengths and noise shaping, etc. than the more affordable Chord DACs. Some big, heavy R2R DACs in the same price range as those more affordable Chord DACs have rather overkill analog components, and some prefer their sound. There might be some things I'm missing in which the non-Chord DACs are still better in some areas, but if so, I can't tell what it is from measurements.
Since we're on this topic... I'm thinking it would make more sense to get the Blu MkII before the DAVE. People are going crazy over it, and it looks like it would result in better sound for a slightly lower price too. On the other hand, since they're meant to be paired to get the ultimate sound and cost so much (nearly $22K together), it would make most sense to simply wait until I could easily afford both. I do like the idea of starting with the Qutest and adding the Blu long before the DAVE...but five figures each for multiple products is nothing to sneeze at. I wouldn't even touch anything beyond the Qutest until after acquiring my endgame speakers, anyway.
Since it seems you are considering the DAVE, I would suggest thinking long and hard about the equipment you plan on using with it, and what to give priority to.
When I spent $1,295 on the 2Qute, I was only using $300 studio monitors. (I had five figures worth of headphones before, but transitioned to speakers last year and ended up vastly preferring them.) I'm using a $30 audio interface at the moment, but upgraded to floorstanding speakers and am getting far better sound than before. So although you can improve the sound of your system with a DAC, more often than not you will get a much more significant sonic improvement by upgrading your transducers.
