You can't hear the taps either but clearly you are enamored by them.
Ah, the straw man. Come on, Amir. Let's not inch toward ad hominem. I didn't claim I could hear taps. That's just some term used to explain or quantify the number of runs performed in upsampling, which I can't hear either. Are you questioning whether upsampling is done? Surely, that isn't unicorn tears. What does the box do? Presumably, it performs upsampling. Does the upsampling improve the subjective experience? I'm not sure how we'd graph that, do you?
All I can say is I've heard the Mojo, the Mojo2 and the Qutest, all of which use upsampling. I don't claim to understand all of the ins and outs of upsampling but I can hear a difference. I don't know if it's worth $14k, but I get it. Listening to the $300 HQPlayer, I hear it, though in that case, $300 is not such an enormous sum to spend. There's a guy on YouTube who's running A/B tests of a system with and without upsampling. It's not a double-blind test. Nor is it a night and day difference. It's easier to hear a difference with certain tracks and it's more obvious in reverse, that is, you can hear it lose something when the M Scaler is not engaged.
The guy in the video felt vindicated, as if he'd shown us all a big difference. Clearly, it was bigger to him. Then again, he wasn't listening to a room recording of someone's sound system through whatever compression they use in YouTube videos. But even on my end, I heard something. I wasn't in the room or rocking my Susvara. But I heard it.
I still have questions about upsampling, whether it's the best way to go, even if I like the result. What if what I'm hearing is just the result of DSP? How many times has somebody thought their music had been enhanced when all they were hearing was some bit of psychoacoustics? You can create a stereo effect with a comb filter. That doesn't mean the recording was in stereo. You can create the illusion of a larger soundstage. You can fool people into thinking this headphone or that amp has captured
more detail by simply boosting the treble, in the right places.
I'm not enamored with
the taps. I'm simply saying that this is Chord's strategy. It's what they're selling. They're selling machines that upsample. The way they keep score is to point to the number of
taps. That, by itself, doesn't prove that their boxes are better. It's simply what they're offering the consumer. HQPlayer does the same thing, but you have to provide the PC. It's also a lot less plug-and-play. It's a firehose of filters. That device has also produced effects I like, and at a much more attractive cost, though I still question if what I'm hearing is
better, in terms of anything substantial (like better transients and timing) or simply more audio magic brought to you by DSP.
You measured the Chord. These are your measurements we're going over. Did you listen to the unit at all? What did it sound like? Can you describe what you heard? Most importantly, did you hear any of this jitter? Did it interfere, in any way you can describe, with your listening experience? I'm asking because the graphs suggest it was at a volume I'm not sure I would hear or notice. Did you? If not, did it really take away from the listening experience? And speaking of that experience, was it any good to begin with?
Obviously, if the jitter isn't noticeable, then the jitter issue is merely academic. Why would I care about something I cannot hear? I know Rob Watts claims we can hear heavy breathing on Pluto, but that's like asking Steve Jobs for an objective assessment of the Lisa. I'm asking you. Did you hear this jitter? I'm also asking if it undermined your listening experience with the Dave and whether that experience was any good to begin with?
