Chord DAVE Review (DAC & HP Amp)

[DSJR]

My brain isn't able to detect differences beyond 20kHz or below -100dB, there is no need to try.

I somehow get the feeling that the number of TAPs might be nothing but this manufacturers scheme to part people from their money.

I'm not disagreeing at all and I doubt I can naturally hear much above 10kHz now (standard audiology tests don't go up that far although my prime hearing deficiency is the 4 - 6kHz region). It's just that *subjectively,* some systems seem to reproduce more clearly the room or venue a good recording was made in better than others do. The Chord 'systems' I heard didn't, where the (here) well known Kii Three on another occasion in the same room seemed to do it rather well as did the Dynaudio Focus 50's which are largely unknown and regarded with some suspicion I think, as the wireless active concept seems to be too much for a trad domestic high end dealer to take - currently.

In a typical music mastering, where's the 'reverb tail' in level? Around forty to sixty dB down, or am Ii I being too kind and it's actually twenty to thirty dB below mean levels?

 

[lc6]

This can be enlightening :

Does a 4 million taps FIR filter sound better than a 16K one? Let's find out.

Claim A claim is frequently made that DAC digital filters with a lot of taps can make a significant difference in sound quality. Some software packages and even hardware manufacturers are touting the benefits of large FIR filters, often with millions of taps, supposedly because these produce a...

www.audiosciencereview.com

From a signal processing perspective, I do not understand what those long FIRs are really for (unless some oversampling and interpolation is involved). The digital source signal is, presumably, already bandwidth-limited to below the Nyquist frequency (if it were not, it would contain aliasing, which even the longest FIR would not be able to remove). Thus, the focus should rather be on the quality of the analog reconstruction filter after the DAC, not the digital filter in front of it. But, I guess, with modern DSPs and FPGAs coupled with large and fast RAM, the MAC operation is cheap enough to implement that the number of filter taps can be absurdly high.

 

[fpitas]

From a signal processing perspective, I do not understand what those long FIRs are really for (unless some oversampling and interpolation is involved). The digital source signal is, presumably, already bandwidth-limited to below the Nyquist frequency (if it were not, it would contain aliasing, which even the longest FIR would not be able to remove). Thus, the focus should rather be on the quality of the analog reconstruction filter after the DAC, not the digital filter in front of it. But, I guess, with modern DSPs and FPGAs coupled with large and fast RAM, the MAC operation is cheap enough to implement that the number of filter taps can be absurdly high.

And they can charge more for it!

 

[HarmonicTHD]

And they can charge more for it!

Dollar per Kilotap is the new pricing unit for it.

 

[zajogungster]

Performance is one thing, what I wonder though who is the target group of this product, as it is rather small and looks toyish which is not what a typical audiophile looks for at a five digit price.

getting good results with measurement is an art, as is selling it. hats off to that

 

[lc6]

Dollar per Kilotap is the new pricing unit for it.

For those interested in technical details, there is an application note by Analog Devices that explains the basics of sigma-delta DACs starting on PDF page 28. It shows the function of the digital interpolation filter (where, presumably, having millions as opposed to only hundreds of taps adds a lot of value) and the analog output filter (see Fig. 14.34 on PDF page 30).