Use a light touch and you’ll think it’s moving when it’s not. While the iPod’s click wheel was sensitive to a light touch, the QP1R is at the opposite end of the spectrum: You must press down on the steering wheel with some force. Questyle’s steering wheel is a navigational disaster. You’d highlight something and then just as you’re about to click select it, the selection would nudge up or down. Questyle went with a mechanical wheel, a design that Apple left behind because over time you’d start to have issues such as imprecise, phantom movements. It’s not even a stationary, touch-sensitive wheel like what was on the old iPods (or even the first-generation Sonos controller, for that matter). I won’t mince words: Questyle’s steering wheel is a disaster. The steering wheel: A problem waiting to happen Questyle includes a Toslink cable in the box. One feature the QP1R has that the other two players don’t is a Toslink digital output in addition to its analog headphone output (both are 3.5mm). It left them out in the audiophile’s belief that they’re unessential components that could potentially, however negligibly, compromise the player’s audio performance. You can’t use it as a USB DAC, either. Questyle didn’t omit those features to cut its manufacturing costs. The QP1R lacks the wireless features you’ll find on competing players: Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are absent. The 3.5mm line-out jack next to the headphone jack is also a Toslink output. But be warned: there are some 200GB microSD cards that don’t play nicely, so be sure to buy a reputable brand. There’s 32GB of onboard storage and two microSD expansion card slots capable of supporting cards up to 200GB each. Sadly, Questyle has no plans to support MQA tracks with this model. That chip can also decode DSD128, 5.6MHz music files without converting them to PCM first. There’s nothing retro about what’s under the QP1R’s hood, starting with Cirrus Logic’s incredibly powerful CS4398 DAC, which is capable of decoding high-resolution music files with up to 24-bit resolution and sampling rates up to 192kHz. The Questyle QP1R’s stem-like volume control is one of its most distinctive design elements.
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