XDuoo 05BL Pro with Chord Mojo

Review of XDuoo 05BL Pro and Chord Mojo
Ok - The item arrived from China today faster than expected.
For those of you not familiar with this device - this is a $58 (Nov 2020) Bluetooth reciever with a single digital coax output. It is made for XDuoo's own DAC, but as it happens can be connected to a Chord Mojo to add bluetooth to it.

So here is my quick find after about an hour or two with the device.
Pros:
- Small, cute, light. Does function properly as it should!
- better sound quality than expected (after some minor discoveries)
- pretty good range! see later
- easy to use, media buttons work too.
- cheap enough
Cons:
- Not a lot actually

This item is about 1mm thinner than Mojo, not counting its flared ears at ends. And internally the whole thing is actually a littler smaller than Mojo's width - so technically for those who are good with DIY and a fine saw, it can be made to fit the exact size of Mojo's end with cutting off the sides carefully and repositioning the jack, to make it look like a mini Poly ! Those who dont want to do so much, can simply resolder the output leads internally to the other (otherwise not connected) jack, and remove the current jack, to make a reasonable fit for Mojo.




I found a piece of plastic that fitted into the optival input of the Mojo, a drop of glue and a bit of black nail varnish later - it looks like this - not so pretty, but functional
Indeed it does have LDAC, aptX HD etc. at varying bitrates and sampling frequencies - they all function well, and Mojo responds to differing sampling frequencies with colour change.
Sound quality:
You see I did have a Fiio BTR5 and I did put it through its paces extensively. This guy is better by a good margin!
For one thing, Fiio had a terrible range with LDAC 990kb/s - less than a meter sometimes! XDuoo managed a good 4 meters in opensight, it only started to crackle once I stepped out of the room.
Distortion is low acros the bandwidth. BUT the bandwidth becomes narrower - the very low bass and very high treble gets muted a little.
Also compared to USB, sound looses that extra airiness that Mojo can resolve around instruments - sound stage flattens a bit.
Remember, I am comparing a lossless USB direct connection to a compressed (by the phone) BT alternative. A lot of it is/was to be expected - so I am nit-picking, there is no way a compressed audio BT connection was going to match a direct lossless connection.
Indeed the device is doing very well. I am impressed.
Codecs, Sampling Frequencies & bit rates
I played with those settings, to cut the long story short, the best combination was
LDAC 16bit 48kHz 990kb/s
Indeed 24bit made no improvements to my ear (still early days though), 660kb/s sounded as good too. However 44.1kHz and 96kHz settings made the sound loose a bit of its three dimensionality, perhaps because of extra data the codec has to compress.
However, somehow on well recorded SACD material the sound was a little better on 24bit 96kHz, but on standard CD, I preferred the mentioned setting.
Mistakes I made at first !
this is a little warning section, so you don't repeat my mistakes.
- If it is the first time you connect anything to COAX input of Mojo, the volume is set at zero! remember to put it up, or you wonder why there is no sound! Also Mojo remembers the volume setting for different inputs independently.
- I use Neutron player on my Android phone, I forgot to set High-Res Bluetooth under Generic driver settings. This meant that Hi-res audio was not routed directly to BT codec.
- My bloody phone activated its internal Dolby Atmos crap enhancer by default on bluetooth, so what I heard at beginning was very off-putting. took me a little while before I realized the damn thing comes on by itself.
Once it was switched off the sound became a very close version of USB direct connection.
Conclusion
to add bluetooth functionality to a Mojo at this price is a steal! never mind one that sounds good enough not to embarrass itself.
Besides apart from Poly I do not know of another alternative! do you ?
I have not checked battery performance yet - I will report anything else I find.
Weirdly! or is it I am imagining it, my Mojo seems to keep its cool connected to COAX compared to USB , I mean it has not warmed up yet after about an hour so far! Curious . . .
I have known myself to change my mind after long auditioning a device.
But until (if) I do, I recommend this, it really impressed me.
Diana Krall, on the girl in the other room sounds very clear and lush with XDuoo and Mojo - I easily listened to the entire album while writing this.