Chord Electronics Owners & Discussion Thread

[Guest Eggcup The Daft]

2 hours ago, Ittaku said:

In fact, a simple but very quiet "technical" type DAC, like the top Topping DAC at $500 would be interesting since we'd be moving all the filtering in the audible range and most of the oversampling to the upsampler, but alas 384 is the highest you'd be able to use there as well.

I would have thought that the key thing here is that the replacement upsampler/scaler completely replace the upsampling in the following DAC to get the maximum benefit from any improvement. That's why I think SIme is having problems with the Brooklyn, as the Sabre chip does different processing (I vaguely remember something about it doing least to DSD, so a replacement upscaler would presumably need to feed Sabre chip based DACs the appropriate speed DSD to minimise the DAC's own processing?)

 

17 minutes ago, davewantsmoore said:

Chord with 16x

I presume an owner can correct me on this, but doesn't the WTA2 variant run at between 16x and 256x, dependent on the input and the processor?

[Hi-Fi Whipped]

4 hours ago, Ittaku said:

A huge shout out and thanks to Sime for flying down expressly for this day and bringing his hardware at his own expense.

 

Whilst others are off on their way to listen to the mscaler in another system I'll give my rundown of my experience with it. All listening tests were done sighted so if this is of issue to you, please skip my post right now. As you would have seen in the picture above, my system has an MSB reference DAC which is fed DSP modified 44/48/88/96 data from a PC. Normally my system has the DSP acting as a crossover to feed active subs, but with the variable latency (up to 600ms) the mscaler would have added, I deemed this to be inadequate for a fair comparison since the alignment between main speakers and subs would have been way out. So my speakers were used as full range for comparison with the mscaler in, and various amounts of upsampling from the base frequency was done where possible, or used in bypass mode. One extremely unfortunate limitation for this comparison was clear even before we started. The mscaler works best when run at its highest sample rates over 700kHz, which would require use of the proprietary chord DAC dual coaxial interface which my DAC doesn't support. Furthermore, I contacted MSB in advance to discover that the coaxial input as I have it configured on my DAC only supported 192 as the maximum input frequency, even though the DAC allegedly supports up to 3072 - it only supports this with the network renderer. This means at best we were only listening to 1/4 of the capability of the mscaler. The most interesting part of this experiment to me was the use of long filter oversampling in combination with an R2R AKA ladder DAC. At first we listened to a lot of my regular sample tracks, these are almost exclusively classical, and all some form of high-res - all 24 bit, most 88 or 96, with some 44. My experience with the top of the line Chord DAC (the DAVE) in the past was very unsatisfying - it sounded nothing short of awful in my system (see my system showcase thread for my review) - so I was wary of it being perhaps the Chord sound and that introducing the mscaler would bring back that sound. The good news is that it did not in any way change the sonic signature of my DAC to make it sound like the DAVE.  Any difference imparted to 96/24 sources was quite subtle, but none of them were bad. As we went down to 24/44 sources the difference became more obvious and was most pronounced by the time we got to 16/44 sources.

 

There was a subtle improvement in top end sweetness, with a little less edge to the sound, voices sounded a little less harsh and more full bodied and warm, bass notes seemed more focused in space, and the presentation a little more distant and relaxed. Other reviews have described more speed, impact, and greater bass leading edge - I did not experience that, which is interesting since that's meant to be one of its aims. With the 16/44 sources, we could do this in steps going to 16/88 and then 16/176. Each step amplified the changes of the one before. There was nothing negative about the change to the sound, which was very reassuring. It was certainly a fascinating and rewarding experiment, but it's a crying shame that we couldn't really remotely test the limits of what it had to offer. Lack of time and unbalanced inputs meant we really couldn't just replace my DAC with the qutest that Sime brought along to see how much it improves that particular DAC that supported the highest resolutions. Was this a night and day difference? No, not on high res sources where it was quite subtle, but was clearly advantageous on the lower resolution sources. Had we been able to go to 768kHz, who knows.

 

Will I be buying one? No. Given most of my source is highres these days, there's very little to be gained for the price, especially given I would only be using 1/4 of its upscaling capacity. If I was still listening to predominantly CD I'd seriously consider it. I think a more interesting experiment is to compare a $10k standalone DAC with a $1K similar technology DAC chained to this $7.5K upsampler. It'd be interesting to see what's actually more important. In fact, a simple but very quiet "technical" type DAC, like the top Topping DAC at $500 would be interesting since we'd be moving all the filtering in the audible range and most of the oversampling to the upsampler, but alas 384 is the highest you'd be able to use there as well. Maybe if Chord offered an upsampler at half the price that was aimed more at the general market it would be worth its weight in gold, but they obviously have to lean people towards buying their DACs as well.

Great to hear another user experience, most of this thread has been hijacked by the usual suspects having a pissing contest on their audio expertise and they appear to have no experience with the item in question at all, rendering most of the thread pointless.

[Hi-Fi Whipped]

4 hours ago, Ittaku said:

A huge shout out and thanks to Sime for flying down expressly for this day and bringing his hardware at his own expense.

 

Whilst others are off on their way to listen to the mscaler in another system I'll give my rundown of my experience with it. All listening tests were done sighted so if this is of issue to you, please skip my post right now. As you would have seen in the picture above, my system has an MSB reference DAC which is fed DSP modified 44/48/88/96 data from a PC. Normally my system has the DSP acting as a crossover to feed active subs, but with the variable latency (up to 600ms) the mscaler would have added, I deemed this to be inadequate for a fair comparison since the alignment between main speakers and subs would have been way out. So my speakers were used as full range for comparison with the mscaler in, and various amounts of upsampling from the base frequency was done where possible, or used in bypass mode. One extremely unfortunate limitation for this comparison was clear even before we started. The mscaler works best when run at its highest sample rates over 700kHz, which would require use of the proprietary chord DAC dual coaxial interface which my DAC doesn't support. Furthermore, I contacted MSB in advance to discover that the coaxial input as I have it configured on my DAC only supported 192 as the maximum input frequency, even though the DAC allegedly supports up to 3072 - it only supports this with the network renderer. This means at best we were only listening to 1/4 of the capability of the mscaler. The most interesting part of this experiment to me was the use of long filter oversampling in combination with an R2R AKA ladder DAC. At first we listened to a lot of my regular sample tracks, these are almost exclusively classical, and all some form of high-res - all 24 bit, most 88 or 96, with some 44. My experience with the top of the line Chord DAC (the DAVE) in the past was very unsatisfying - it sounded nothing short of awful in my system (see my system showcase thread for my review) - so I was wary of it being perhaps the Chord sound and that introducing the mscaler would bring back that sound. The good news is that it did not in any way change the sonic signature of my DAC to make it sound like the DAVE.  Any difference imparted to 96/24 sources was quite subtle, but none of them were bad. As we went down to 24/44 sources the difference became more obvious and was most pronounced by the time we got to 16/44 sources.

 

There was a subtle improvement in top end sweetness, with a little less edge to the sound, voices sounded a little less harsh and more full bodied and warm, bass notes seemed more focused in space, and the presentation a little more distant and relaxed. Other reviews have described more speed, impact, and greater bass leading edge - I did not experience that, which is interesting since that's meant to be one of its aims. With the 16/44 sources, we could do this in steps going to 16/88 and then 16/176. Each step amplified the changes of the one before. There was nothing negative about the change to the sound, which was very reassuring. It was certainly a fascinating and rewarding experiment, but it's a crying shame that we couldn't really remotely test the limits of what it had to offer. Lack of time and unbalanced inputs meant we really couldn't just replace my DAC with the qutest that Sime brought along to see how much it improves that particular DAC that supported the highest resolutions. Was this a night and day difference? No, not on high res sources where it was quite subtle, but was clearly advantageous on the lower resolution sources. Had we been able to go to 768kHz, who knows.

 

Will I be buying one? No. Given most of my source is highres these days, there's very little to be gained for the price, especially given I would only be using 1/4 of its upscaling capacity. If I was still listening to predominantly CD I'd seriously consider it. I think a more interesting experiment is to compare a $10k standalone DAC with a $1K similar technology DAC chained to this $7.5K upsampler. It'd be interesting to see what's actually more important. In fact, a simple but very quiet "technical" type DAC, like the top Topping DAC at $500 would be interesting since we'd be moving all the filtering in the audible range and most of the oversampling to the upsampler, but alas 384 is the highest you'd be able to use there as well. Maybe if Chord offered an upsampler at half the price that was aimed more at the general market it would be worth its weight in gold, but they obviously have to lean people towards buying their DACs as well.

Great to hear another user experience, most of this thread has been hijacked by the usual suspects having a pissing contest on their audio expertise and they appear to have no experience with the item in question at all, rendering most of the thread pointless.

[Kaynin]

2 minutes ago, Hi-Fi Whipped said:

Great to hear another user experience, most of this thread has been hijacked by the usual suspects having a pissing contest on their audio expertise and they appear to have no experience with the item in question at all, rendering most of the thread pointless.

 

I'm glad you said it and not me...although I did say this several times today.

[davewantsmoore]

 

1 hour ago, Eggcup The Daft said:

I would have thought that the key thing here is that the replacement upsampler/scaler completely replace the upsampling in the following DAC to get the maximum benefit from any improvement.

It's very hard to generalise about this.    "Bypassing" what is going on inside the DAC is sometimes harder and not as beneficial, as it could seem.

 

"Native" or "least processing" etc.... seems intuitive best, but reality is more complex.    A little like "how much oversampling?" and "how many taps?"    The questions have reasonably complex answers, which "depend".

 

1 hour ago, Eggcup The Daft said:

I presume an owner can correct me on this, but doesn't the WTA2 variant run at between 16x and 256x, dependent on the input and the processor?

I'd have to go look .... the noise shaper runs lots faster.

[davewantsmoore]

6 minutes ago, Hi-Fi Whipped said:

rendering most of the thread pointless.

Indeed... it's a shame that it takes so long to correct misinformation.  Does seems kinda pointless.    Perhaps I should follow my new years resolution (failure so far) and go 'full subjective'.

 

I'll be banned in 5 posts.   

[Kaynin]

Firstly I'd like to say it was a pleasure to meet @Ittaku today and great to see him open up his home for the listening session.  Secondly great to meet @joz again and finally hear the Illuminators!  Anyway, on to my simple thoughts from today. 

 

These are two very, very different systems.  Everything I heard at @Ittaku 's improved with the M Scaler when up sampled to 176.  It wasn't just a subtle change, it was a huge difference.  A couple of times I said to myself "wow".  The sound stage opened up, the music was more relaxed and smoother.  We listened to a varied choice of music so the system was put through its paces, but mainly left out material that would test the bottom end because the subbie was (understandably) switched off. 

 

When listening to the M Scaler in @joz's system I heard difference, but I can't say it was better (sorry @Sime V2, but after 3 hours it was given a fair chance!).  @joz's system is of a high standard to begin with when considering it's a full range, large scale and well balanced system.  It digs so deep, has sweet mids and plenty of detail through the highs.  Remember we heard the full 700+ kHz at @joz's too...

 

Anyway, it appeared to me that the M Scaler improves more when improvement can be made.  Is it worth $7,000 of improvement/difference in either system?  Well, that's up to the individual... 

 

[Guest Eggcup The Daft]

39 minutes ago, Hi-Fi Whipped said:

Great to hear another user experience, most of this thread has been hijacked by the usual suspects having a pissing contest on their audio expertise and they appear to have no experience with the item in question at all, rendering most of the thread pointless.

Before you presume, I had a recent demo of the Qutest and a very short introduction to the m scaler with it. I heard an improvement in imaging, and also to my ears an apparent change in balance, but in less than five minutes i wouldn't presume to put it forward as "experience" but got a glimpse of something.

 

I'd also been trying HQPlayer without much luck with my Oppo - the sound changes, but doesn't "improve" - using a Dell laptop with i5, so nothing special, but first unfold MQA from the Windows Tidal app does improve the sound on the same unit. I probably didn't find the best settings, though and didn't directly compare, since I reformatted in between listening to the two of them.

 

As it happens, the big argument in this thread has been theoretical and knowledge of the underlying hardware and principles has more to do with what has been said than the product itself. It would be nice to have some measurements on a combination with the m scaler in place - who's reviewed it?

 

 

 

 

[Guest Eggcup The Daft]

48 minutes ago, davewantsmoore said:

It's very hard to generalise about this.    "Bypassing" what is going on inside the DAC is sometimes harder and not as beneficial, as it could seem.

I guess that you could have a situation where the hard work is shared between a scaler and the DAC itself. That could be harder than bypassing, of course. I'm assuming that the device doing the upscaling would be set out as an upgrade to what's in the DAC box.

[Ittaku]

55 minutes ago, Kaynin said:

When listening to the M Scaler in @joz's system I heard difference, but I can't say it was better (sorry @Sime V2, but after 3 hours it was given a fair chance!).  @joz's system is of a high standard to begin with when considering it's a full range, large scale and well balanced system.  It digs so deep, has sweet mids and plenty of detail through the highs.  Remember we heard the full 700+ kHz at @joz's too...

That's most surprising @Kaynin, especially given the incremental improvement we saw with each step up in rate. What DAC does Joz have? By the way, my only regret about today was that Sime doesn't eat cheese or drink beer or wine!

[Kaynin]

6 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

That's most surprising @Kaynin, especially given the incremental improvement we saw with each step up in rate. What DAC does Joz have? By the way, my only regret about today was that Sime doesn't eat cheese or drink beer or wine!

 

Yeah, the blue cheese was awesome    and the beer went down way too easy!

 

@joz has an Elektra DAC, bu we were running the Chord Qutest with the M Scaler.

[legend]

9 hours ago, Kaynin said:

<snip>

When listening to the M Scaler in @joz's system I heard difference, but I can't say it was better (sorry @Sime V2, but after 3 hours it was given a fair chance!).  @joz's system is of a high standard to begin with when considering it's a full range, large scale and well balanced system.  It digs so deep, has sweet mids and plenty of detail through the highs.  Remember we heard the full 700+ kHz at @joz's too...

 

Anyway, it appeared to me that the M Scaler improves more when improvement can be made.  Is it worth $7,000 of improvement/difference in either system?  Well, that's up to the individual... 

 

Like @ittaku I am surprised as I think I have a fairly high standard system that is very revealing/low distortion and the changes I heard when Sime kindly brought the M-Scaler to my Qutest were huge - the sort of thing that this review (that is nominally about the Blue 2 but really about the M-Scaler)  describes better than me

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/chord-blu-mk-ii-digital-cd-transport.22848/reviews

 

I want an M-Scaler so I don't have to worry about the source when developing loudspeakers  - but am also struggling with the cost so have been reading widely over the past week about software alternatives, including HQPlayer and XXHighEnd, but they seem to require a lot of experimenting with uncertain results.  I guess in the end one has to pay for someone else's (Rob Watt's) 30+ years of experience and intellectual property?

[joz]

10 hours ago, Kaynin said:

 

Yeah, the blue cheese was awesome    and the beer went down way too easy!

 

@joz has an Elektra DAC, bu we were running the Chord Qutest with the M Scaler.

Oh dear, more cheese and beer at my place!

Though I would have liked to have spent more time with the Chord combo to hear more about what the pair can add.

Could it be system dependant?

[Addicted to music]

10 minutes ago, joz said:

Oh dear, more cheese and beer at my place!

Though I would have liked to have spent more time with the Chord combo to hear more about what the pair can add.

Could it be system dependant?

 

1 hour ago, legend said:

Like @ittaku I am surprised as I think I have a fairly high standard system that is very revealing/low distortion and the changes I heard when Sime kindly brought the M-Scaler to my Qutest were huge - the sort of thing that this review (that is nominally about the Blue 2 but really about the M-Scaler)  describes better than me

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/chord-blu-mk-ii-digital-cd-transport.22848/reviews

 

I want an M-Scaler so I don't have to worry about the source when developing loudspeakers  - but am also struggling with the cost so have been reading widely over the past week about software alternatives, including HQPlayer and XXHighEnd, but they seem to require a lot of experimenting with uncertain results.  I guess in the end one has to pay for someone else's (Rob Watt's) 30+ years of experience and intellectual property?

Quote from the link @legend quoted,   Any of you guys did this on any of the USB or coaxial cables while evaluating the scaler?  

 

 

So time to start adding ferrites to the cable. I focused on trying to improve the Tripp Lite cable, since that was closest to CD direct. After adding 10 ferrites to the Tripp Lite (on the Blu2 end), there was still a gap with CD direct, but it was clearly better than where I started. When I got up to 20 ferrites, quality was very close to CD direct. After getting to 30, very close to what I heard with 20 ferrites, but with perhaps a VERY small improvement from 20 ferrites. In pushing things to 40 ferrites, I couldn’t detect a change from 30.

At this point I found CD direct to be slightly better than the ferrite-loaded Tripp Lite cable (more space, and slightly better imaging), but very close. I hit diminishing returns on ferrites somewhere between 20-30 ferrites, with no downside (other than a deep personal shame for having a USBcable with 40 ferrites  to have more ferrites on the cable.

 

[Guest]

My opinions on yesterday’s trip to Melbourne will stay quiet, for many reasons. 

[Ittaku]

29 minutes ago, Addicted to music said:

 

Quote from the link @legend quoted,   Any of you guys did this on any of the USB or coaxial cables while evaluating the scaler?  

 

 

So time to start adding ferrites to the cable. I focused on trying to improve the Tripp Lite cable, since that was closest to CD direct. After adding 10 ferrites to the Tripp Lite (on the Blu2 end), there was still a gap with CD direct, but it was clearly better than where I started. When I got up to 20 ferrites, quality was very close to CD direct. After getting to 30, very close to what I heard with 20 ferrites, but with perhaps a VERY small improvement from 20 ferrites. In pushing things to 40 ferrites, I couldn’t detect a change from 30.

At this point I found CD direct to be slightly better than the ferrite-loaded Tripp Lite cable (more space, and slightly better imaging), but very close. I hit diminishing returns on ferrites somewhere between 20-30 ferrites, with no downside (other than a deep personal shame for having a USBcable with 40 ferrites  to have more ferrites on the cable.

 

Please don't turn this thread into a cable debate. I'm quite sure cables had nothing to do with this.

[Addicted to music]

8 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Please don't turn this thread into a cable debate. I'm quite sure cables had nothing to do with this.

That’s not my intention, 

the reason for highlighting that was to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the what you have. Just remember this thing is upspling at a high rate.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Addicted to music

[Ittaku]

1 minute ago, Addicted to music said:

That’s not my intention, 

the reason for highlighting that was to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the what you have. 

See this is the thing. I think network, usb, and digital cables have absolutely zero effect on performance. I just make sure mine meet standards, like 75 ohm etc.

Edited January 27, 2019 by Ittaku

[Addicted to music]

3 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

See this is the thing. I think network, usb, and digital cables have absolutely zero effect on performance. I just make sure mine meet standards, like 75 ohm etc.

Did you calibrated he 75 ohm and had that terminated correctly at 75ohms?

[powerav]

Just wondering why the M Scaler doesn’t have USB out considering a lot of dacs will do 768 on USB but only 192 on optical and coaxial?

[Ittaku]

No further comment on cables from me.

[Ittaku]

Just now, powerav said:

Just wondering why the M Scaler doesn’t have USB out considering a lot of dacs will do 768 on USB but only 192 on optical and coaxial?

Presumably because they invested heavily in their proprietary dual coaxial format?

[powerav]

Presumably because they invested heavily in their proprietary dual coaxial format?

Ok. I can see other companies jumping all over this now and bringing the own scalers out with USB.

[Ittaku]

28 minutes ago, powerav said:

Ok. I can see other companies jumping all over this now and bringing the own scalers out with USB.

USB out also carries with a certain degree of complexity to do with the fact you're running a USB controller on your device, which is different to the USB receiving device. That doesn't make it impossible of course, just different. Given that a miniPC is an excellent USB controller, the logical cheap way to create competition is to create a miniPC that does the upscaling in software on a proper CPU (or perhaps GPU) instead of an FPGA. Whether a PC doing a super long filter without Watt's Transient Aligned will equal or rival the mscaler though is anyone's guess (though some would insist it's guaranteed to). Perhaps this should be my next project...

Edited January 27, 2019 by Ittaku

[legend]

7 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

 Whether a PC doing a super long filter without Watt's Transient Algorithm will equal or rival the mscaler though is anyone's guess (though some would insist it's guaranteed to). Perhaps this should be my next project...

Yes please!!!!!