Review and Measurements of Chord Mojo DAC and Amp

[Thomas savage]

Perhaps post one of your reviews, I enjoy fiction.
Keith

You have too much time on your hands Keith.

 

[Veri]

Clearly, my last comment which answers the responses to my first comment was removed. One has to question to motives, and more importantly, the agenda of the owner of this website who chooses to censor the views of those who prove that the entire premise of the website is wrongheaded. What does the owner fear about truths - or if he doesn't think they are - about disagreement? I think it is cowardly and juvenile.

Dissent should not be censored. Rather, for intelligent debate, it should be encouraged. The ONLY reason to remove a comment that is not libelous or disrespectful is not the fear of lies in the comment, but the fear of TRUTHS. Accordingly, I have reposted my comment and have taken screenshots/and PDF of it. If it is removed again, that'll be fine. I will then post the PDF at HeadFi and other like-kind, with copies to various audio magazines around the world. However, if it is left intact, the owner of this website is welcome to remove the two paragraphs above the dashed lines below and leave the rest intact.


PAGE 17


https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ements-of-chord-mojo-dac-and-amp.5120/page-17

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Thank you for the engaging commentary all, but I will stick to listening. Listening during the design stage and before release is the last operation before the manufacturer releases a new product. It is what manufacturers of audio equipment across the globe do before releasing a product in whose creation measurements were taken. Those of you who enjoy listening immensely to measurements of cheap audio equipment seen at your pages you can barely afford over listening to music are welcome to continuing this practice. However, uncontrolled conditions listening, as one of you had stated, is not conclusive. Correct, but it is, like most of the commentary here, taking an illogical premised logically to its illogical conclusions, face palms and all. Skip the juvenile stuff, shall we?

You may consider these words as my very last objection to "science" that is anything but.
Leaving to all of you the last word. Accordingly this answers your various responses to my offending your hubris and your egos.

Those of us who listen to high end gear don't take most of the low end stuff very seriously - with few exceptions - for good reasons too many to even list here.
In our consideration of them, we would say six of one; and a half dozen of the other.
This also applies to much of the high end - not all of it.

I am reminded of the debate ongoing here, to note it is as old as the audio business, as I respectfully reclaim Barrack Obama's mostly unwise words: It's "settled science." But then what can you expect from a former community organizer in an Empty Suit with an authentic, genuine I tell you, REAL birth certificate who rested his entire personna on a ghost-written autobiography about his father's communist dreams, a man whose greatest achievement was to direct his hapless clients to the nearest welfare office? Well, he's gone and so is his legacy, we can breathe clean air again.

So, measurement are "settled science," inasmuch as global warming is.
In fact everything is so, unless it isn't.

I wrote about settling that science too:

Confessions of a Denier: The Last Word on Global Warming

All these thoughts, seemingly disjointed at first, will come together before I end my rant here and give the gavel over to you.

With experienced panels of formally experienced listeners, Bob Carver had shown some decades ago that he could make his amplifier sound exactly like any other amplifier. Exactly. Yet the measurements of one against the other were quite different between the amps and his own had only minor changes in measures not at all reliably connected to what the panel heard. Never mind that many things cannot be measured at this stage of the art. I mean, today. Ergo, those of us into music and are knowledgeable about it, as well as audio, listen to the sound, not to the measurements. My reasoning is that I have never heard a graph in syncopation with my feet.

Life is too short for an audiophile or music lover of any political persuasion to read graphs instead of enjoying the wealth of music available. As in, measurements are no more a guide to quality sound than they were a half century ago.

For example, part of the year I live in the world's most beautiful city, Budapest. For five years we lived right across the street from the famed Opera Haus now undergoing renovations. A couple of blocks from the Liszt Conservatory and Music School. In the summers to opera opens its windows, and mine are opened too. I hear every performance, as well as many more practice sessions.

Now not so much in the colder winters as Europe's most beautiful Christmas Market will end. Now we live a couple of blocks from it, but just a ten minute walk to the opera. Across the street behind the Basilica lives one of America's music geniuses, the video at its end is taken from his flat...put on your headphone, enlarge the player, put the sound up, and hear the ZOLI BAND...and do listen to its end.

The story is of a fellow, a good-old boy American, who found his home in this fairly tale city. As I wrote earlier - it too is my story.

In Budapest one can avail themselves of listening to live sound regularly - non stop. Visitors are surrounded by an astonishing musical culture. Obviously, while I do listen to a variety of music, even electronica, to judge the quality of audio equipment one has to compare the reproduced with live sound performed in a real space. Yes, I understand all the shortcomings of doing it. A synthesizer or drum kit, even an electric piano, is not a standard of reference. Nor are most recordings. In this light then, a photo of a scope display, or that of a frequency analyzer or voltmeter, tells us absolutely nothing with respect to the sound or music.

Arturo Delmoni the concertmaster of the New York City ballet playing an ancient violin for one personally can.

If graphs and charts do tell you something, I recommend you take them to bed and snuggle up with them.

One might also consider, and I say it respectfully, that there are many people who will find refuge in false "science" or a measure of something meaningless when they cannot actually hear well to begin with. Or care to. In other words, they substitute talking about specifications because something is lacking in their lives. I can't answer for that. Most don't have good equipment to listen to anyway - the example are your pages. Or really can't afford good equipment and resent those who can. I won't get into the psychological reasons or the politics of envy and resentment that impact all our lives - including audio. I call them what Spiro Agnew would, The Nattering Nebobs of Negativism.

None of this should be surprising when we find that most millenials and young adults have been listening with outrageous headbanging volume for years and have lost a significant part of their hearing. Also, for many the "sound" or music, is of limited intellectual interest, for they like answers to which there are none that science can provide, and like to play with cheap toys seen at your pages where the cheapest wins over the better - one case being the Mojo.

There are others who are absolutely convinced we can measure everything about electronics, and there are no gaps in our knowledge. Which reminds me, not using an exact quote, of the great Bush's SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, who said: There are things we know; there are things we don't know; and then there are things we don't know we don't know. I assume, unless proven otherwise, you belong in the first and second, I, in the third.

I explain this phenomenon in examples of children leading political or even science movements, for example the gun control marches in the US, and the 16 year old snotnose Greta whose misguided and ignorant bloviations about global warming is legend, and remind me of the comments I see at this website. Right here, and I refer you to the third paragraph to explain it all starting with the words "When I was much younger..." :
My Life as a Young Genius

Andrew Benjamin Jul 2, 2014

Early in my career I worked with Julius Futterman, the inventor, or at least the lad who first commercialized the transformerless tube amp. He was already an elderly man. I was much younger but being much younger as I explained in the link above, I was much smarter. In the crib I was the smartest of all. Ever since the crib, it's been downhill for me.

I was building amps at Julius' "factory" off Broadway on 72nd Street. Potting transformers, the works. Two for myself, including two headphone amps for ESL STAX headphones. The last were the reference for what one should expect from the larger home system.

We were aware even in those days that solid state amps sounded like turd, constricted, threadbare, bones without flesh, while even the most primitive tube amp sounded more like music. As we watched Stereo Review, AUDIO, and others like-minded purveyors of Fairy Tales listening to graphs while watching their oscilloscopes, guys like myself invited good looking women over to my former flat, opened a great bottle of red, lowered the lights, adjusted the Maggie Tympani 1-Ds, later the Acoustats, later the Martin-Logan CLSes, put on an LP, and the rest is HIS story. In this case my story. Today I own no tube equipment, simply for convenience reasons.

Incidentally, what equipment, brand please, have you folks ever designed using measurements that told us everything to be known about how it will reproduce music? Just askin.'

I'll hold my breath awaiting the Sounds of Silence in the void of hubris. Also, while you're at it, why not measure the PS Audio DAC with its different software in the two latest updates, one sounding quite different from the other? What will you do if you cannot measure any significant - or attributable to its sound - difference?

Meanwhile some decades ago your far more capable, intelligent, and experienced predecessors Peter Moncrieff and Peter Aczel each started their respective measurement-oriented magazines IAR (International Audio Review) and Audio Critic. I knew both gents personally and the evolution in their thinking, as well as the fate of their publications (before the Internet) was instructive. Today anyone with zero knowledge about anything, even less experience, no access to top line goods, and a great deal of arrogance, hubris, and ignorance, and a test bench, can have an opinion on the Internet over which they spout their latest fairy tales and conspiracy theories.

Well, you all know what one can do with an opinion. We all have one don't we?

This history is interesting, especially in light of people who actually listen to, and have access to, top line equipment on various systems. In most cases, as in the early years of The Absolute Sound which arguably had the greatest impact on the high end, two to three reviewers listened to the same amp, preamp, whatever. They arrived by argument to a consensus about it and their words were published. Later this policy was dropped, and a single reviewer gave his opinion, which even in my mind, unless corroborated by others, is problematic. Or at least, one can take it with a grain of salt. Under this reasoning, one can consider the arguments we are having here, that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who love the sound of the Chord Mojo and purchased this product precisely for those reasons. A few do not, mostly for operation or cosmetic reasons, not sonic ones. No amount of measurement, graphs and scope photos can displace the opinions of thousands of persons with experience listening to DACs or any other audio products.

Measurements are merely arguments meant to disprove reality: what one's ears hears. Graphs suggest to the listener who knows otherwise "you're not really hearing what you claim to be hearing, and therefore I am right and you are wrong." Worse, you are stupid!

These are all exercises in one-upsmanship, and not science.

Importantly, on a great loudspeaker for its time, for example using Harry Pearson's IRS Reference and some others with a purely resistive load, one could easily act as an electron microscope on which one should be able to hear "differences" and/or be able to judge which amp, preamp, or DAC (these days) is "better." Better meaning musical. All this is available without one having wrapped themselves up in the falsehoods that measures can tell us how a component sounds. It didn't back in the early eighties, and doesn't today. With Harry's system I was able in a few seconds tell which highly touted state-or-the-art class A solid state amp sounded like a Piece of Schiff, and which sounded filled with bloom, transparency, openness, and dynamically shaded (make of those words what you will.) With one, one can relax into the director's chairs in HP's listening room, with the other, one would shrug his shoulders and say to HP, let's go out to eat. That is exactly what I told HP when he put on the solid state amp glowingly touted by one measurement über alles magazine.

Oh sure, I fully understand that this website has made a substantial investment into the egos of its writers wrapped up in their narratives, the same way half of the United States and much of the world has folded up into its belief systems being propagandized by a craven media for a solid three years - the conspiracy theory paid for by the other party that the president of the United States is a Russian spy. Tens of millions of people believed it, still believe it, because they want to believe it. That's what hate and defeat and disruption does. Disrupt someone's belief system, religion, or political outcome, and he becomes a very angry, vengeful, and hateful person.

The measurement über alles school of audio engineering and reporting is thankfully as dead as a doornail, and/or Obama's legacy, except for the 300 or so Spartans (measurers) holding off the invading hordes of the unwashed (listeners), satisfied knowing they too will be dead eventually. But not year after the 300 Spartans have bitten the dust.

But at least in the minds of the former, they'll be doing the "right thing" by holding on to their opinions and graphs, spears and shields.

Man's ability to delude himself is legend.

Incidentally, can I sell you a Russian Collusion story based on a PP dossier Hillary Clinton paid for that will launch an unconstitutional surveillance of a presidential candidate? No? And why not?

Thanks guys here who don't agree with my words for keeping Sparta and Aesop's Fables alive. At least to humor those of us with actual experience. Some of the "those of us" I speak for actually are in business building excellent equipment and making millions doing it. They are making millions because the equipment they produce are good, and because they are disruptors like America's current president - changing the game.

Meanwhile audiophiles the world over continued to read Aczel's Audio Critic and Moncrieff's IAR, believed in the two men, everything they read in the magazines, attended forums among themselves and at audio societies. And a few noticed that there's something really, really wrong with their own systems when they purchased the recommended products from these two and from others like-minded.

What was wrong?

Just the sound that masquaraded as music. These readers spoke among themselves over late night phone calls, as they do today via emails and forums, through the grapewine, visited each other, and either returned the new component they just bought, and kept the one they were ready to ditch, or just bought something else recommended by a "subjective" reviewer they trusted because the reviewer happened to be correct many times before. (Some admittedly were wrong on occasion).

Subjective reviewers are people who report what they hear, rather than what they read about a component from a guy who didn't even bother to listen to it, but rather, published instead a great photo of his oscilloscope display.

These are the same kind who will write auto reviews from his arm chair.

People got smart and accordingly, the high end grew exponentially.

Meanwhile, as both TAS and Stereophile and a few others grew and are still doing business showing the path to most consumers, Audio Critic and IAR are face down in the dirt. DOA so many years ago I can't even remember. They are dust, buried, as well as the memories that buried them.

Now that I'm older, married, and my wife no longer allows me to "entertain" hot, long-legged 25 year-old women, except on my birthdays (I have at least three), I will open a great bottle of red from our basement wine cellar, and celebrate the end of that dirtbag Soleimaini in Iraq. I'll fire up one in my collection of DACs, maybe the borrowed Chord DAVE, and listen to the latest streams from Amazon Unlimited - a genuine treasure trove.

As my last words, may I add yours instead? "Oh goodness not this again...... "

https://is.gd/doQIxo

I wrote this from the airport. Cheers! Off on a long trip this time.

We can barely afford listening to music ????? Because we trust in measurements?!

Oh God, seriously man. Elitist jerk award goes to...

And please do us a favour and read the ASR manifesto. You're not the first to change his mind about 'these things'..

 

[dc655321]

This was caught as spam .. sorry my bad.

I think your spam filter was working perfectly.

 

[Gregory I Hayes]

IIRC it reaches its best performance at 5Vrms. Forgot where did I read that one from.

What colors does the MoJo didplay at 5Vrms?

 

[majingotan]

White on both volume lights

 

[raif71]

Recently got a 2nd hand mojo (less than a month) with good price (much lesser than the dropped price). I find the sound has better clarity, good separation of instruments and powerful when driving my Senns 6 series and Sundara. Overall I'm satisfied and impressed. However, I guess I would think twice about buying this at full price and have been lurking around the 2nd hand audio forums for a few months now ever since the price drop and decided to buy it after getting a good deal. I love the lights as it is different than my other players

 

[vkvedam]

Recently got a 2nd hand mojo (less than a month) with good price (much lesser than the dropped price). I find the sound has better clarity, good separation of instruments and powerful when driving my Senns 6 series and Sundara. Overall I'm satisfied and impressed. However, I guess I would think twice about buying this at full price and have been lurking around the 2nd hand audio forums for a few months now ever since the price drop and decided to buy it after getting a good deal. I love the lights as it is different than my other players

In comparison to?

 

[vkvedam]

Mojo only reaches 3Vrms not 5Vrms when in line out mode or volume turned to 100%

 

[PyramidElectric]

Mojo only reaches 3Vrms not 5Vrms when in line out mode or volume turned to 100%

Not true, the 'line out' mode is set at 3v but if you switch it out from that mode it goes much louder.

 

[Music1969]

Mojo only reaches 3Vrms not 5Vrms when in line out mode or volume turned to 100%

Line out mode (3Vrms) is not it's maximum level... as @PyramidElectric shows above.

 

[raif71]

In comparison to?

My transport (player) is Fiio X3II and mojo simply brings the life out of an old player.

 

[Altiplano]

Can someone explain how to best use the Mojo with an external amp with respect to volume?

I have a cheap external amp with unknown but fairly high gain.
- The manual recommends setting volume to 2V and using volume on the amp. This is all well and good but due to the high gain, it would seem this severely limits usable range on the pot.

- Is there any disadvantage to just setting Mojo down in volume to recover some adjustment range on the amp?

 

[Music1969]

- Is there any disadvantage to just setting Mojo down in volume to recover some adjustment range on the amp?

No disadvantage. The Mojo has very transparent digital volume control.

 

[Altiplano]

No disadvantage. The Mojo has very transparent digital volume control.

Thanks! I'll give it a go

 

[Deleted member 17887]

I try to make the last part clearer. In the 80s some SS amplifiers were developed, like the Adcom GFA555, some of the early NAIM power amps, Yamaha P3500S and others, that were know to have (some) good measurements, yet sounded, arguably, bad - for the Adcom lack of dynamics and detail, and so on. ..

The P3500S wasn't around in the 1980s. I think it was first introduced about 25 years after that in about 2005. I don't even think it's predecessor the P3500 was introduced until the mid-1990s.

You might have the timing right about the Adcom but maybe not the character, which Stereophile describes as having better dynamics and detail than a Krell.:
https://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/678/index.html

1980s NAIM amps were listed #1 and #2, at least for their time: https://www.whathifi.com/us/features/9-of-the-best-naim-audio-products-of-all-time

So as usual, there are some different opinions out there.

 

[mocenigo]

The P3500S wasn't around in the 1980s. I think it was first introduced about 25 years after that in about 2005. I don't even think it's predecessor the P3500 was introduced until the mid-1990s.

You might have the timing right about the Adcom but maybe not the character, which Stereophile describes as having better dynamics and detail than a Krell.:
https://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/678/index.html

1980s NAIM amps were listed #1 and #2, at least for their time: https://www.whathifi.com/us/features/9-of-the-best-naim-audio-products-of-all-time

So as usual, there are some different opinions out there.

Of course there are different opinions. Those NAIMs are known to be not too much refined and poor at depth reconstruction, even though they are very good at "PRaT" (whatever that is, foot tapping induction I guess). Some people swear about the NAP250, but my feeling is that it is more about its character. The Adcom seems to have overemphasised bass (or maybe it does not control too well) and fatiguing highs (may have been the speakers, as well), but it was probably quite good for the time.

 

[DivineCurrent]

I never really knew about the Chord Mojo until now, I saw it mentioned on Head-Fi before but I dismissed it as another boutique audiophile thing that didn't measure well. Glad to see at least it has good performance relatively speaking. Even if it's priced a little high, I am interested as it has digital volume control plus lots of power for a portable. Only thing holding me back is the battery issues reported everywhere, but I don't like charging anything (like my phone) plugged in 24/7 so hopefully that shouldn't be an issue.

 

[A Surfer]

I never really knew about the Chord Mojo until now, I saw it mentioned on Head-Fi before but I dismissed it as another boutique audiophile thing that didn't measure well. Glad to see at least it has good performance relatively speaking. Even if it's priced a little high, I am interested as it has digital volume control plus lots of power for a portable. Only thing holding me back is the battery issues reported everywhere, but I don't like charging anything (like my phone) plugged in 24/7 so hopefully that shouldn't be an issue.

It measures fairly well if I remember correctly. I owned the Mojo and enjoyed it. It wasn't the magic elixir that Rob tried to suggest, but it was a pretty solid device in my experience.

 

[Stan Smitchen]

I would definitely not buy the Chord Mojo a second time. The device has a completely outdated battery technology that takes forever to recharge: 5 hours and 30 minutes from 20% to 100%. The battery life is little more than 7 to 8 hours. That is an absolutely poor performance for 2020. In addition, the device does not get hot when in use, but still uncomfortably warm.

In addition, I'm no longer a fan of this imprecise, colorful, light-based analog volume control.

 

[Jorj]

I still use mine, but I would not buy it now. Not sure what I would buy, but there are much better options. Mine still gets decent battery life (6-8 hours), but the EMI issue is really a pain.