Review and Measurements of Chord Mojo DAC and Amp

[Veri]

No doubt Mojo2 will have this and the RF issues sorted (like Hugo2).
I have to agree with you to not recommend the Mojo in 2020 because I think the recent retail price drop may hint at a Mojo2 in 2020...

I mailed them before to ask if there will be Mojo2 but they didn't want to answer

 

[Music1969]

I mailed them before to ask if there will be Mojo2 but they didn't want to answer

They don't answer about future unannounced products. That's understandable and quite normal.

And I can't imagine they would want to shoot themselves in the foot (reduced Mojo sales) by talking about Mojo2 until it's ready for release....

Mojo is now the oldest of the current production DAC/amps so it's gotta be a matter of time. Especially with lessons learnt (and things fixed with Hugo2).

Plus the overall quality of the competition has really risen, as we know from measurements here.

 

[vkvedam]

The RF is the very reason I sold my Mojo. Plus I couldn't tell the difference between NX4DSD and Mojo with my current headphones and earphones. And I can't use Mojo as a standalone DAC unit for my speakers, D50 does it pretty well and it beats Mojo IMHO. And I can't recommend Mojo V1 in this day and age. May be Mojo V2 if they plan to release it.

 

[JJB70]

They don't answer about future unannounced products. That's understandable and quite normal.

And I can't imagine they would want to shoot themselves in the foot (reduced Mojo sales) by talking about Mojo2 until it's ready for release....

Mojo is now the oldest of the current production DAC/amps so it's gotta be a matter of time. Especially with lessons learnt (and things fixed with Hugo2).

Plus the overall quality of the competition has really risen, as we know from measurements here.

I agree with most of this, but there are older DAC/amps still in production. The Cambridge DACmaginc+ goes back to around 2012 and is still on sale, and despite it's age and probably having fallen behind the competition in measured performance is still a very good piece of equipment with plenty of inputs (including optical) and XLR outputs selling for a relatively modest cost given it is a high street retail price. And companies still make the O2/ODAC which must be a similar age and again although falling behind in measured performance still perform well in audible terms and aren't particularly pricey.

For all measured performance of DACs has been improving, from a consumer perspective they reached audible transparency years ago and most on-board DACs work well. Provided the DAC you have is compatible with the files you use and has the sample rate and bit depth needed then I don't really think anyone needs to worry about the DAC as a performance pinch point even with older models. The DAC is the part of the audio chain for which audible transparency is accessible for the lowest cost in the whole audio chain. Listen to CD players going back over 20 or 30 years and their performance was excellent.

 

[Music1969]

I agree with most of this, but there are older DAC/amps still in production. The Cambridge DACmaginc+ goes back to around 2012 and is still on sale, and despite it's age and probably having fallen behind the competition in measured performance is still a very good piece of equipment with plenty of inputs (including optical) and XLR outputs selling for a relatively modest cost given it is a high street retail price. And companies still make the O2/ODAC which must be a similar age and again although falling behind in measured performance still perform well in audible terms and aren't particularly pricey.

For all measured performance of DACs has been improving, from a consumer perspective they reached audible transparency years ago and most on-board DACs work well. Provided the DAC you have is compatible with the files you use and has the sample rate and bit depth needed then I don't really think anyone needs to worry about the DAC as a performance pinch point even with older models. The DAC is the part of the audio chain for which audible transparency is accessible for the lowest cost in the whole audio chain. Listen to CD players going back over 20 or 30 years and their performance was excellent.

Noted.

My mistake, what I meant to say was Mojo is now the oldest of the current production Chord DAC/amps

Just to say, Mojo is likely the next one in the Chord lineup to get a new version.

Whether that’s 2020, nobody knows.

 

[VintageFlanker]

Whether that’s 2020, nobody knows

Indeed, the Mojo is their most popular product (being the cheapest) and is already 4 years old (nearly 5).
Usually, Chord announces new products either during CES or Munich High End. I bet for this 2020 CES.

 

[Andrew Benjamin]

As a former reviewer in the United States for many years, well-educated in the sciences, I will say that most of the readers here make up their minds about any component based on measurements. In other words, the sound is not primary. Measurements are.

The only problem (and of course marketing is involved here - for all makers promote "good sound" and/or measures), is that we hear many sonic phenomena we cannot measure, connect to measurement, or at least we can say good measurements don't translate into good sound. And bad ones do not translate into bad sound either. Concentrating on one or more measured segment to exclude a DUT from consideration because another measures better in some other areas, or is cheaper, is hardly smart. Actually, meaningless, and that has been proven over and over on components that the maker could adjust on the fly, inserting all sorts of distortion or manipulation of the square waves. Carver has proved it in published reports many moons ago, before the Internet. Measures, for all intents and purposes, other than for the purposes of the designers and the design, and in spite of assertions to the contrary, are relatively meaningless. Sorry, but that's the way the world tumbles.

In other words, what matters is the sound one gets. It's the only thing that matters.
What does not matter, are measurements for the consumer of high grade audio.

That the MOJO received so many, hundreds, maybe thousands of kudos, and great reviews from people with good ears does matter.
In fact, that fact matters a thousand times more than the measurements taken by one man - or even a dozen.
Of a possibly faulty unit, or faulty techniques in measuring the possibly faulty unit.

I have had many DACs go thought here, including the HUGO and MOJO, some costing multi-thousand dollars.
All are highly regarded.

Irrespective of all this, the MOJO I had here had no charging problems, no heating problems, no dropping out problems, and certainly no sonic ones. The caveat here, it did go in for repair once. Afterward, it has been functioning for months. It is one of the better DACs I heard and certainly await with anticipation the #2 version of it, just to see what it can do.

As one who received early samples of the MOJO, I did tell the manufacturer at the time I thought it was sonically, significantly superior to the HUGO 1. Which it was.

I do recommend however that owners of MOJOs add the iFi Micro 3.0 USB to use with it, and also use the power supply from the Micro to charge, and keep it charged.

Lastly, no matter what you hear from a DAC, or what you measure, it means nothing if you can't hear what it actually does. So, to hear what it does, you need to use the very best headphone or earbud science can create that is available on the market.

I can tell you that the Audeze LCDi4 probably fits this description, and necessity, with a handful of others like-kind.

I can also tell you that with an inferior headphone or earbud, you have no opinion.

 

[March Audio]

As a former reviewer in the United States for many years, well-educated in the sciences, I will say that most of the readers here make up their minds about any component based on measurements. In other words, the sound is not primary. Measurements are.

The only problem (and of course marketing is involved here - for all makers promote "good sound" and/or measures), is that we hear many sonic phenomena we cannot measure, connect to measurement, or at least we can say good measurements don't translate into good sound. And bad ones do not translate into bad sound either. Concentrating on one or more measured segment to exclude a DUT from consideration because another measures better in some other areas, or is cheaper, is hardly smart. Actually, meaningless, and that has been proven over and over on components that the maker could adjust on the fly, inserting all sorts of distortion or manipulation of the square waves. Carver has proved it in published reports many moons ago, before the Internet. Measures, for all intents and purposes, other than for the purposes of the designers and the design, and in spite of assertions to the contrary, are relatively meaningless. Sorry, but that's the way the world tumbles.

In other words, what matters is the sound one gets. It's the only thing that matters.
What does not matter, are measurements for the consumer of high grade audio.

That the MOJO received so many, hundreds, maybe thousands of kudos, and great reviews from people with good ears does matter.
In fact, that fact matters a thousand times more than the measurements taken by one man - or even a dozen.
Of a possibly faulty unit, or faulty techniques in measuring the possibly faulty unit.

I have had many DACs go thought here, including the HUGO and MOJO, some costing multi-thousand dollars.
All are highly regarded.

Irrespective of all this, the MOJO I had here had no charging problems, no heating problems, no dropping out problems, and certainly no sonic ones. The caveat here, it did go in for repair once. Afterward, it has been functioning for months. It is one of the better DACs I heard and certainly await with anticipation the #2 version of it, just to see what it can do.

As one who received early samples of the MOJO, I did tell the manufacturer at the time I thought it was sonically, significantly superior to the HUGO 1. Which it was.

I do recommend however that owners of MOJOs add the iFi Micro 3.0 USB to use with it, and also use the power supply from the Micro to charge, and keep it charged.

Lastly, no matter what you hear from a DAC, or what you measure, it means nothing if you can't hear what it actually does. So, to hear what it does, you need to use the very best headphone or earbud science can create that is available on the market.

I can tell you that the Audeze LCDi4 probably fits this description, and necessity, with a handful of others like-kind.

I can also tell you that with an inferior headphone or earbud, you have no opinion.

Oh goodness not this again......

Measurements demonstrate the engineering quality of a product. Its a total myth that we hear sonic attributes we cannot measure. Thats just an excuse audiophiles use to justify their decisions.

What is "hardly smart" is to make judgements about audio quality under sighted and uncontrolled conditions. Your subjective conclusions will be faulty as a result. Those people with "good ears" would not be able to reliably identify many dacs from others if they were put under controlled conditions. It is these opinions, all that verbose subjective waffle, that are totally meaningless.

Measurements absolutely do matter. They give you confidence about the engineering and the likely transparency of the device. You are mistaken about the purpose of the measurements seen on this site, however if it measures well it will sound good.

So yes, what matters is the sound, but in relying on uncontrolled sighted listening as I have no doubt you do, you are not making accurate judgements. You will often think you hear differences that simply arent there. If you were "well educated in the sciences" you would know this to be the case.

 

[majingotan]

As a former reviewer in the United States for many years, well-educated in the sciences, I will say that most of the readers here make up their minds about any component based on measurements. In other words, the sound is not primary. Measurements are.

The only problem (and of course marketing is involved here - for all makers promote "good sound" and/or measures), is that we hear many sonic phenomena we cannot measure, connect to measurement, or at least we can say good measurements don't translate into good sound. And bad ones do not translate into bad sound either. Concentrating on one or more measured segment to exclude a DUT from consideration because another measures better in some other areas, or is cheaper, is hardly smart. Actually, meaningless, and that has been proven over and over on components that the maker could adjust on the fly, inserting all sorts of distortion or manipulation of the square waves. Carver has proved it in published reports many moons ago, before the Internet. Measures, for all intents and purposes, other than for the purposes of the designers and the design, and in spite of assertions to the contrary, are relatively meaningless. Sorry, but that's the way the world tumbles.

In other words, what matters is the sound one gets. It's the only thing that matters.
What does not matter, are measurements for the consumer of high grade audio.

Kindly read the first post of ASR Manifesto before you comment about your criticisms regarding measurements.

Nobody here mentioned that Mojo sounds bad BTW. It gets a bad rep here for Rob Watts marketing his FPGA DAC having vanishing low noise and distortion (well beyond 24 bits) but measurements show that it is not performing as Rob Watts claim.

Also, I've A/Bed the Mojo against the Apple lightning DAC/amp and when both used as PURE DACs, they sound inaudibly different from each other. As a DAC/amp for CA Andromeda known to be sensitive in output impedance of sources, there's a difference, but it's due to the frequency response deviation from output impedance between the two and not because Mojo's FPGA DAC is superior sonically than the Apple lightning DAC.

Irrespective of all this, the MOJO I had here had no charging problems, no heating problems, no dropping out problems, and certainly no sonic ones.

It only holds true if one would actually use it for what it is which is obviously as a portable DAC. A lot of Mojo users actually use this as a desktop DAC and some use the Mojo while charging which is just asking for overheating and premature battery death. I certainly use it for what is intended hence my battery life is still excellent when I bought mine in 2015

I do recommend however that owners of MOJOs add the iFi Micro 3.0 USB to use with it, and also use the power supply from the Micro to charge, and keep it charged.

I do this too but I don't keep it charged since that also degrades battery life. After being charged fully, I just remove it from the iUSB 3.0

 

[headwhacker]

LOL

 

[Veri]

I do recommend however that owners of MOJOs add the iFi Micro 3.0 USB to use with it, and also use the power supply from the Micro to charge, and keep it charged.

Ah yes, better audiophile charge

 

[Frank Dernie]

As a former reviewer in the United States for many years, well-educated in the sciences, I will say that most of the readers here make up their minds about any component based on measurements. In other words, the sound is not primary. Measurements are.

The only problem (and of course marketing is involved here - for all makers promote "good sound" and/or measures), is that we hear many sonic phenomena we cannot measure, connect to measurement, or at least we can say good measurements don't translate into good sound. And bad ones do not translate into bad sound either. Concentrating on one or more measured segment to exclude a DUT from consideration because another measures better in some other areas, or is cheaper, is hardly smart. Actually, meaningless, and that has been proven over and over on components that the maker could adjust on the fly, inserting all sorts of distortion or manipulation of the square waves. Carver has proved it in published reports many moons ago, before the Internet. Measures, for all intents and purposes, other than for the purposes of the designers and the design, and in spite of assertions to the contrary, are relatively meaningless. Sorry, but that's the way the world tumbles.

In other words, what matters is the sound one gets. It's the only thing that matters.
What does not matter, are measurements for the consumer of high grade audio.

That the MOJO received so many, hundreds, maybe thousands of kudos, and great reviews from people with good ears does matter.
In fact, that fact matters a thousand times more than the measurements taken by one man - or even a dozen.
Of a possibly faulty unit, or faulty techniques in measuring the possibly faulty unit.

I have had many DACs go thought here, including the HUGO and MOJO, some costing multi-thousand dollars.
All are highly regarded.

Irrespective of all this, the MOJO I had here had no charging problems, no heating problems, no dropping out problems, and certainly no sonic ones. The caveat here, it did go in for repair once. Afterward, it has been functioning for months. It is one of the better DACs I heard and certainly await with anticipation the #2 version of it, just to see what it can do.

As one who received early samples of the MOJO, I did tell the manufacturer at the time I thought it was sonically, significantly superior to the HUGO 1. Which it was.

I do recommend however that owners of MOJOs add the iFi Micro 3.0 USB to use with it, and also use the power supply from the Micro to charge, and keep it charged.

Lastly, no matter what you hear from a DAC, or what you measure, it means nothing if you can't hear what it actually does. So, to hear what it does, you need to use the very best headphone or earbud science can create that is available on the market.

I can tell you that the Audeze LCDi4 probably fits this description, and necessity, with a handful of others like-kind.

I can also tell you that with an inferior headphone or earbud, you have no opinion.

As a 50+ year uaes of hifi equipment I have segued from all measurement based to "if you hear a difference you didn't measure you are measuring the wrong parameter" to measurement based again.
Some of this came about because after I retired I had more time and less money so I checked stuff more extensively personally.

In the end the only thing linking one hifi component to the next are the cables between the terminals so what is inside the component only matters in so much as it may influence the output voltage, frequency and phase of the electrical signal at the terminal. There is nothing else.
We are able to measure voltage differences of 140dB, the ear is 120dB max in a healthy young person (HYP). We can measure the frequency from DC to megahertz, the ear is 20Hz to 20kHz in HYP (the audio frequency bandwidth is trivially small in electronics terms) and we can measure phase.
So which of these do you suggest could be the thing we don't measure which has an effect, remember that there is nothing else?
My proposition is the one thing we can't measure which effects sound quality is the placebo effect.
It is very powerful, we know that sugar pills can completely cure some illnesses, as long as the patient believes it will, even though this seems barely credible.
So I believe the thing which makes people hear differences which don't show up in measurements can only be explained by the unmeasurable placebo effect.
If a person susceptible to it believes that a programme running on a FPGA could improve SQ then they will indeed hear an improvement.
If a person susceptible to the idea that a silver foil paper and oil capacitor in a component will improve SQ then they will hear an improvement here too.
If there is no, or a negligible, change to the voltage, frequency or phase at the output terminals we know that there will be no, or negligible change to the air pressure fluctuations (sound) at the ear, so any improvement in the SQ can only be the unmeasurable placebo effect.
There is no other plausible explanation which I have seen yet.
I am still waiting after 50 years.

 

[vkvedam]

That the MOJO received so many, hundreds, maybe thousands of kudos, and great reviews from people with good ears does matter.
In fact, that fact matters a thousand times more than the measurements taken by one man - or even a dozen.
Of a possibly faulty unit, or faulty techniques in measuring the possibly faulty unit.

I have had many DACs go thought here, including the HUGO and MOJO, some costing multi-thousand dollars.
All are highly regarded.

Irrespective of all this, the MOJO I had here had no charging problems, no heating problems, no dropping out problems, and certainly no sonic ones. The caveat here, it did go in for repair once. Afterward, it has been functioning for months. It is one of the better DACs I heard and certainly await with anticipation the #2 version of it, just to see what it can do.

Andy, I understand your perspective. I lived with the Mojo for 4 years before I finally decided to sell it. I decided to sell it based on the fact that I couldn't distinguish it from Topping NX4DSD by doing a lot of A/B with my current gear. In addition Mojo has some sever cons, it runs hot when you charge and use it at the same time, it's very RF prone, it's got whistling caps in the circuit which I could pick up through the headphones/earphones. NX4DSD has a black background in comparison.

I am an engineer and I do believe in measurements. Having said that the ear prefers the second harmonic distortion a lot hence the valve amplifiers are still selling, nice colouring of sound. An accurate and neutral sounding gear will always measure good, no question.

 

[Andrew Benjamin]

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.

 

[Andrew Benjamin]

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

-----------------------------

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.

 

[Thomas savage]

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.

This was caught as spam .. sorry my bad.

 

[Thomas savage]

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.

Wow , ok .

Some bonkers ramblings here , Less is more!

I'm regretting undeleting your other post now lol

 

[Andrew Benjamin]

Thank you Sir, I thought you had censored my long-winded rant.
It happens when one has too much waiting to do at an airport after sitting on the tarmac for four hours.

))

Best wishes to all.

 

[Thomas savage]

Thank you Sir, I thought you had censored my long-winded rant.
It happens when one has too much waiting to do at an airport after sitting on the tarmac for four hours.

))

Best wishes to all.

Ha ha I understand. Try valium, works for me

 

[Purité Audio]

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