In this case, the Dave is the problem, not the headphones. I have the Sennheisser 800S. On my Sony TA-ZH1ES (an infinitely better headphone amplifier than the Dave), the 800S sounds very good with minimal if any brightness. It sounds in fact liquid in the midrange. The Sony weighs probably twice...

I have a Blu2 with the Dave DAC in a nice Choral stand. Sonically, they’re great, operationally a disaster. I had endless issues with the Blu2 and the Dave. Finally sent it in to Chord’s service center here in the US in Connecticut. They gave me the run around initially but finally decided to...

To me, neither digital — at any resolution or bit depth — nor vinyl sounds anything like live music. When I want to hear what real instruments sound like, I attend a concert of the San Francisco symphony orchestra or take in an opera, or even a chamber music performance. I was on an extended...

Just curious. If you copy a file to your USB drive with your fancy cable vs. a vanilla cable, would you expect the copies to be different?

I think this statement applies broadly to all of audio. One can easily spend $100K on a turntable, a preamplifier or amplifier, and Magico here in the San Francisco Bay Area has just released their latest Q9 speaker that costs almost a million dollars. As the saying goes, if you have to ask for...

Keep in mind that a good chunk of London real estate is owned by Russian oligarchs, the so-called “London-grad” district. $100K DACs will be bought by these folks to go into their huge yachts. Chord is trying to keep up with the Joneses, as the saying goes. Naim has a $100K preamp, and so Chord...

Comparisons of DACs is like comparing wines — I live in wine country in the San Francisco Bay Area! You’ll never get two people to agree on their best choice of wines in Northern California. With thousands of wineries to choose from, there’s choice to spare. In my own little town, we have at...

Celebrating Christmas Eve here in the Bay Area sipping some Hennessy cognac, listening to some beautiful west coast jazz played back on my Blu2/Dave, shown here in its fetching Chord stand. The album is Gerry Mulligan’s Dream a Little Dream on Telarc. Fabulous recording made late in his career...

I have the same ARC Ref 3 preamp. In my (30+ years) experience, no DAC at whatever price point you care to explore can project a soundstage like a top of the line balanced tube preamp can. I tried comparing my Blu2/Dave direct into a variety of power amplifiers vs. going into the Ref 3. There’s...

Fans of the M-Scaler might “enjoy“ reading its review on ASR. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/chord-m-scaler-review-upsampler.35498/ Review summary: “Conclusions I was very disappointed to see high noise levels and jitter on Coax outputs of such an expensive...

I have about 6 DACs at home, a mixture of solid state and tube, stand alone vs integrated with a CD player or a digital amplifier, at price points separated by three orders of magnitude. I find system matching crucial with DACs, as with any other component. There’s no absolute best DAC, and...

Another DAC to consider, designed here in California, although it is quite a bit pricier than the Dave. https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/the-digital-director-a-new-msb-product-improving-everything-from-the-source-to-the-output.34897/page-11

I think you’d be surprised by how many respectable audio designers of notable products, as well as professionals in the audio recording industry, believe that most of high end audio is, to use a phrase first used by the legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz: “high phooey and hystereo”. For example...

That’s your subjective opinion and you are certainly entitled to it. It’s your money and you can choose to spend it however you see fit. However, the issue at hand is not subjective opinion, but objective measurements. If you’re going to make outlandish technical claims about -300dB S/N ratio...

It’s worth pointing out that all the issues raised by the ASR review were brought out in other previous reviews (e.g., Stereophile) and the relatively lackluster measurements of the Dave pointed out in the ASR review have been confirmed in many other reviews. It’s lackluster headphone...