musician aquarius r2r dac any good?

I had Musician Pegasus and of course when I wanted to upgrade one of the DACs I considered was Musician Aquarius. 

The funny thing about Aquarius, yes, soundstage was better, separation was better, everything sounded more coherent but it did not feel as musical as Pegasus. To my ears the sound was brighter but somehow didn't encourage toe-tapping like Aquarius. I guess it sounded more uh....analytical?

Anyway I tried many other R2R DACs, including the top-end XLR Rockna Wavedream and a few upsampling D/S DACs for good measures. And I settled on Lab12 Dac1 Reference. It's slightly cheaper than Aquarius and very barebone in features in that only accepts signal to 192 Khz, but the sound is glorious. Seriously, to my ears, it sounded better than Wavedream. It is certainly a good candidate for end-game DAC. If you have a local dealer you really should give this an audition. One other DAC that really impressed me at this price range was TEAC UD-701N, organic and non-fatiguing as well. You might want to consider that if you wanted a more complete package of streamer and pre-amp. 

I have the Musician Pegasus in my HeadFi rig and like it a lot. Depends totally on what sound characteristics you’re looking for, but I’d recommend reading the review  of the Aquarius on stereonews.net to see if it might be a good fit.  It’s one of his favorite and highest-rated DACs for whatever that’s worth. All I can say is he also reviewed my Pegasus and I completely agree with his assessment. Hope this helps, and best of luck.

I forget to mention, my system consisted of Chord Qutest (will be replaced) -> MC220 ( Mcintosh Preamp) -> MC352 (power amp) - > b&w 805 d3s (speakers).

My Quest sounds fine, but I am looking for a more transparent sound with deeper and wider sound stage. The Qutest does not have that deep of sound stage.