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The Chord DAC bandwagon

beammeup said:
Lots of further interesting responses regarding Chord. Those than can't tell the difference do you have a system transparent enough (usually the need for excellent loudspeakers) to hear any changes from the digital front end?

Chord does have a good following - it can only mean Chord is very good or ....

I got this response from an email after asking for advice on a DAC after mentioning Chord as a manufacturer for comparison (I won't say who)...

"if you want to hear what the musician intended go with R-2R…if you want an algorithm’s take on your music then go with the many Delta-Sigma, single-bit, closest approximation DACs on the market"

"Chord is only so popular because it is so popular…most people who own them and rave about them have only compared them to the mediocrity on the market"

Interesting response - but there you go...
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The vast majority of DACs are based on the same, very capable chipsets. Of these manufacturers they'll give you all sorts of reasons why their product is better than the others (special attention paid to the PSU/output stage/circuit design etc etc) but the reality is that they will measure and perform exactly as the chipset designer intended, *unless* they've made a monumental mess up in their implementation... Any differences that do exist in the measured performance will be totally irrelevant to the listener, and swamped by the realities of listening to music (the distortions added by their speakers will be many orders of magnitude greater than the differences between DACs).

In order to stand out in such a market, they have to resort to such statements, but to be fair, they are selling and hats off to them for trying. So long as they don't tell outrageous lies about their or other people's products, i've no issue as they have just as much right to be a success as the established players.

The 'we use FPGA' DAC makers can at least say they aren't straight up copying reference implementations. Saying that, the algorithms they are using will be pretty standard as it's well established science. I'm actually contemplating buying an FPGA board and writing a DAC implementation myself as a fun lockdown project. Once complete I could publish the source and anyone could build one. Might be fun to experiment with. I'll have a bit of a dig and see if there are other examples of this out in freeware land.
 
AndyU said:
Really? Did you ask him for examples of musicians who have said “I intended you to hear my music through an R-2R DAC”? Doubt many musicians know what one is, and even fewer own one!
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Agreed that it's a pretty meaningless statement, however that's such an interesting interpretation of it that appears to be belligerently obtuse, falling far from the "clever/stupid" line. Obviously the "listen using an R2R DAC" bit isn't the (supposedly) stated intent.
 
beammeup said:
Lots of further interesting responses regarding Chord. Those than can't tell the difference do you have a system transparent enough (usually the need for excellent loudspeakers) to hear any changes from the digital front end?

Chord does have a good following - it can only mean Chord is very good or ....

I got this response from an email after asking for advice on a DAC after mentioning Chord as a manufacturer for comparison (I won't say who)...

"if you want to hear what the musician intended go with R-2R…if you want an algorithm’s take on your music then go with the many Delta-Sigma, single-bit, closest approximation DACs on the market"

"Chord is only so popular because it is so popular…most people who own them and rave about them have only compared them to the mediocrity on the market"

Interesting response - but there you go...
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^ This. The difference between DACs can get easily masked by the rest of the system. I tried a Hugo vs a Lindemann CDP’s internal processing via ARC Ref 3 pre, Class D power amps and WB Discoveries. When I played a few discs I could reliably distinguish them and tell that one reliably let me hear harmonics and decay better but it was subtle. In another system it wasn’t possible to tell any difference other than that the Hugo exacerbated a HF tweeter issue and sounded annoying after a while.
First time I heard dCS it was wow! and same again when I plugged a Devialet in at home but that’s an integrated system and not possible to extract what the dac is doing. Way better than the Hugo into the above amps and better than the Lindemann native processing.
 
gustav_errata said:
Agreed that it's a pretty meaningless statement, however that's such an interesting interpretation of it that appears to be belligerently obtuse, falling far from the "clever/stupid" line. Obviously the "listen using an R2R DAC" bit isn't the (supposedly) stated intent.
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I was taught that sentences with “obviously” in them aren’t. No one has got a clue how most musicians intend you to hear things. Probably on as wide a range of equipment as possible, cars, in ear headphones, Sonos speakers, boom boxes, radios, who knows, though some genres now have a radio mix, a club mix and so on which give you a hint. Since a lot of music is mastered and produced by different people, it is quite likely that the musicians never hear in the studio the version that is released after it is mastered.
 
AndyU said:
I was taught that sentences with “obviously” in them aren’t. No one has got a clue how most musicians intend you to hear things. Probably on as wide a range of equipment as possible, cars, in ear headphones, Sonos speakers, boom boxes, radios, who knows, though some genres now have a radio mix, a club mix and so on which give you a hint.
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OK then I'll explain it so that it's obvious to you:

The statement isn't that "the artist intends you to hear it on a certain piece of equipment" but that "the artist intends for the reproduced music to sound a particular way" or, in other words, "the artist wants you to hear what he/she hears" (nevermind whether that's a reasonable statement). It is the salesperson's opinion, not the artist's, that, in order to achieve that particular sound, you need a R2R DAC (again, nevermind for the moment whether that's a reasonable opinion).
 
beammeup said:
I got this response from an email after asking for advice on a DAC after mentioning Chord as a manufacturer for comparison (I won't say who)...

"if you want to hear what the musician intended go with R-2R…if you want an algorithm’s take on your music then go with the many Delta-Sigma, single-bit, closest approximation DACs on the market"

"Chord is only so popular because it is so popular…most people who own them and rave about them have only compared them to the mediocrity on the market"

Interesting response - but there you go...
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Interesting indeed. No name of course but from a musician or a studio professional? Because I have the impression that the last thing a mixing/mastering professional wants is "the talent" anywhere near what they are doing to create the recording that we get to hear.
 
but the salesman wasn’t at the recording, mixing or mastering, and he certainly isn’t the musician. if someone said that to me at a dealers i’d just walk out laughing.
 
sq225917 said:
but the salesman wasn’t at the recording, mixing or mastering, and he certainly isn’t the musician. if someone said that to me at a dealers i’d just walk out laughing.
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As I said, I agree that the statement is meaningless. I was just trying to clarify the original proposition for AndyU, which is why I stressed twice to "nevermind whether this is reasonable", because it is tiresome to read misrepresentations of other people's arguments even if you don't agree with them.
 
My interpretation : the salesman really likes R2R DACs and thinks the Chords are just the current fad.

I'd assume he's personally compared the two main types and the Chords...and could demonstrate the difference.

I would have gone for a demo...would have been very interesting.
 
Cesare said:
First up, i'm a professional DSP engineer, not a chip designer, or FPGA programmer, so I can cover some of this, but not all of it.

The FPGA can be used as a DAC simply because it can produce a bitstream, a fast switching digital output which by varying the amount of high and low bits can represent voltages by the bit density (PDM - see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-density_modulation)

For 16 bit audio at 44.1Khz, without clever noise shaping, you need to basically double the sample rate for each bit, so 15 bit @ 88.2Khz can represent the same voltages as 16bit @ 44.1Khz, so at a basic level, you can get 16/44.1Khz quality with a 1/1.4Ghz signal (44.1 * 2^15). Basically, 32768 * oversampling. This will have a flat noise floor across the audio spectrum below the level of the 16 bit data. Now we can improve on this by shaping the noise, which is the delta/sigma approach (feeding back the error to change the output bit) and by doing this we can shift the noise up about the original 22.05Khz nyquist frequency, and by doing this, achieve the same results without needing such a massive oversampling factor. There's lots of strategies, with different computational costs, and other tradeoffs, but the philips bitstream setup achieved the same quality with 64* oversampling, which is a much more manageable 1/2.8Mhz).

Now for higher bit depths, and higher sampling rates you need to increase the frequency, but you get the idea.

The FPGAs operate in the 200Mhz or so range (the larger ones are slower, the smaller ones faster). So, flipping an output bit at 200Mhz gives us plenty of wiggle room to generate high sample rate and high bit depth audio using the same philips delta/sigma approach that has been well explored. I imagine the chord box is performing high order noise shaping, and obviously it's long length FIR filtering too, but this is all easy stuff for an FPGA, actually, it's easy stuff for any computer.

The overall output quality will then be determined by the clock source for the FPGA, so a high quality stable clock will be needed to avoid modulation type errors creeping into the output.
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Thank you for explaining!

So the output of the FPGA DAC is a PDM bitstream - not unlike DSD, which represents the audio signal through variation of bit density?

It would then go through some I/V stage and on to the output stage, correct?

Sounds clever, but I am not sure that this is clearly superior to the monolithic DACs, which are very sphisticated internally.
 
gustav_errata said:
As I said, I agree that the statement is meaningless. I was just trying to clarify the original proposition for AndyU, which is why I stressed twice to "nevermind whether this is reasonable", because it is tiresome to read misrepresentations of other people's arguments even if you don't agree with them.
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The statement isn’t meaningless, it is just wrong. I didn’t think the post I responded to needed clarifying as I thought I understood it quite well, certainly better than your attempts to clarify it, for which I thank you, but you really needn’t have bothered, and I suggest you give up.
 
John Phillips said:
Interesting indeed. No name of course but from a musician or a studio professional? Because I have the impression that the last thing a mixing/mastering professional wants is "the talent" anywhere near what they are doing to create the recording that we get to hear.
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As a professional musician, I can say that my experience has been quite different. I’ve found recording/mixing engineers to be generally quite concerned with how the performing musicians (even lowly hired-gun sidemen like myself) feel about the sound he or she is getting. If the musician feels that their personal sound is not being well represented, the engineer will usually take serious steps to fix whatever the musician isn’t happy with. I’ve done a lot of recording, mostly as a sideman, and I can’t think of one instance where I’ve been barred from the control room, or discouraged from voicing my opinion on the sound or mix.

As for the topic at hand, I own a Qutest and a Mojo (both quite a stretch on a musician’s budget!) and I like Chord DACs specifically because I feel that I get a lot of realism from them, particularly fast transients like drum hits. As a drummer, I feel that I’m very intimately familiar with what a snare drum sounds like, hit at various dynamics. I wasn’t at any Blue Note recording sessions in the 50s or 60s, so I can’t claim to know "what the artist intended." But I’m fairly confident that I know what Art Blakey or Elvin Jones’ snare drum should sound like, and the feeling I’d get from sitting in it’s proximity. My Chord DACs reproduce that sound and feeling for me better than any other DAC I’ve tried, although I admit I haven’t heard as many as some here.
 
sq225917 said:
but the salesman wasn’t at the recording, mixing or mastering, and he certainly isn’t the musician. if someone said that to me at a dealers i’d just walk out laughing.
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I remember when Linn sales assistants intended that you tap your foot to the chune-making ability of the box. They’d lead by example when the favoured box was playing, even if it was the Mozart Requiem. I’m in some doubt whether that was what Mozart or Sussmayr intended.
 
TheDecameron said:
I remember when Linn sales assistants intended that you tap your foot to the chune-making ability of the box. They’d lead by example when the favoured box was playing, even if it was the Mozart Requiem. I’m in some doubt whether that was what Mozart or Sussmayr intended.
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I’m sure there was some of that going on, but equally I heard Thea Gilmore through Naim & JM Lab and the dealer happily tapped away and when I demo’d an Ikemi the dealer didn’t attempt any foot tapping, just left me to it. Similarly Karik/Numerik/Wakonda/something/Royd Minstrel. Dealer was present and enjoying it all but a corpse would’ve tapped along to those Minstrels that night.
 
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