QUESTYLE TEASES NEW QP2R DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYER

Breaking into a marketplace dominated by Astell&Kern, FiiO and even more recently, the Japanese giant, Pioneer/Onkyo, is no easy street. But Questyle, with persistence and on their own merits have enjoyed huge success in just a short time after being embraced by enthusiasts around the world.

With an impressive stand in the halls of Munich’s MOC for the High End Show, Steve Un, Questyle Audio’s General Manager was on hand to walk us through the brand new, second generation digital audio player, the QP2R Digital Audio Player.

First, Steve pointed out that Questyle’s modus operandi is about changing the way in which we listen to high-fidelity music.

People’s view on high-end audio has changed in the past few years. It seems a bit out-of-date just to sit in front of those heavy and complicated traditional audio systems in a fixed room.

I can’t disagree. For the 21-hour journey from Melbourne to Munich and for the first time, I enjoyed true high-fidelity in portable format via Pioneer’s XDP-300R DAP and B&W P7 headphones. DAPs have certainly come a long way in recent times with levels of fidelity simply now simply not achievable from smartphones.

The 2nd generation of DAP from Questyle draws upon all they learned from the first-gen QP1R, maintaining all the style and beauty of the brand’s first born, but has essentially been rebuilt from the ground up on the electronics side.

Steve Un shows the circuit board of each side by side which reveals better electrical design and layout, improved circuitry, and major revisions to how the boards are isolated from the chassis and switches.

Already holding patents for most of the changes, Questyle have designed and manufactured in-house an entirely new mechanical steering wheel for the controls, along with the volume control. Steve explains this level of precision and quality was simply not attainable from other manufacturers.

It also employs a new fully discrete / full-balanced / current mode amplifier with remarkably low 0.0005% distortion and less than 0.1Ohm output impedance. The amplifier is pure Class A, while the DAC now supports PCM384 and true DSD256.

Questyle QP2R shown with optional dock driving active speakers.

One of the benefits of the newly designed circuitry is four groups of Current Mode amplification circuits located on the front and back of the board – resulting in an extremely short electrical path.

A new BIAS indicator on the side of the QP2R shows the selectable standard bias in orange, or high bias with a red LED.

Outputs include a 2.5mm balanced output along with the traditional 3.5mm stereo output.

The USB Type-C charging port is located on the bottom face of the unit while Questyle suggests a battery life over 10 hours from the 3100mAh Li-Polymer battery.

There’s ample storage with 64Gb internal memory, along with a microSD slot which will support up to 256Gb expansion.

The Questyle QP2R will be available around the end of June this year and is expected to sell locally for under $2000.

For more information visit the Questyle Audio brand page.