We can all agree that timbre and tonal is not Chord strong suits. What Chord Dave + Blu2 excells is separation, dynamic, depth, soundstaging and details. None of the impression mentioned keyword like timbre, tonal, image density, flow, timing which i believe DAC like MSB select 2, Aries Cerat excel at.
I am afraid I disagree most vigorously (and it would be expected that I would disagree!).
The key strengths that M scaler and Chord DACs have is timbre variation, timing and the perception of flow, but the key concept is variation - something which other DACs are in my opinion are poor at. Sure other DACs give the initial impression of more warmth with an unnatural soft sound - or other DACs have a sharp hard edge and can sound impressive before your headache starts... But real life music is about variations, sometimes sounding rich and smooth sometimes sounding bright and fast. It is in the variations that musicality lies, as getting emotional to the music requires that the system is expressive with a wide as possible sound palette.
As regards timbre variations, there are two principle issues that limit the variation in timbre. These are noise floor modulation, and secondly transient timing. Noise floor modulation is pretty obvious; noise is hiss, and sounds bright. If you add some noise that is modulated by the instrument, then that instrument will sound brighter, as the brain can't tell the difference from the instrument and the noise that is dependent on the instrument. And this noise singing with the wanted instrument is noise floor modulation. All of my DACs have no measurable noise floor modulation; every other DAC on the planet has by comparison huge levels of noise floor modulation, so a sax for example will sound unnaturally bright. To compensate for this, DAC designers unwittingly use other aberrations to restore the balance; a softening here, and a dose of low frequency 2nd harmonic there, followed by some power envelope amplitude modulation, to give a fat sound. These tricks I can very easily hear and identify. So in terms of noise floor modulation, Chord DACs have unequalled performance, so that a sax will, with the right ancillaries, sound rich and dark like a sax should do, and of course I have published the measurements that prove that my DACs have no measurable noise floor modulation.
The second issue is transient timing. Transients are an essential psycho-acoustic cue for timbre and to recognise an instrument; remove the transients and it's much more difficult to tell the timbre and what the instrument is. The problem with digital audio is the brain requires transients to be very accurately reproduced in time; if there is timing uncertainty (too early or too late, constantly changing with signal) the the brain can't properly perceive timbre accurately. The only way one can reconstruct the timing of transients perfectly is by using a sinc interpolation filter (known as a Whittaker-Shannon interpolation filter); and the M scaler is identical to an ideal sinc function to better than 16 bits; this means the M scaler will reconstruct the analogue signal to better than 16 bits, preserving the original timing information. Conventional filters are poor, being only the same as sinc to a 2 or 3 bits level. Using the M scaler provides a huge increase in the timbre variation of instruments; and you can not reproduce this level of timbre accuracy unless you use 1M taps, and use a sinc accurate filter. No other DAC comes anywhere close to this performance; and there are no short cuts possible, no magic way round the problem.
As to flow, or the perception of timing and rhythm, then the M scaler is very interesting - as it can sound very fast with heightened tempo; or it can sound slower with a natural sense of flow. The reason we have these two aspects is because there are two different mechanisms going on, and this can affect one's perception of tempo.
The first one is fairly obvious - being able to hear the starting and stopping of notes. When we reconstruct transients without any timing errors (that is transients to early then later too late) then it becomes easier for the brain to hear the starting and stopping of notes - and then things sound clearer, faster and sharper. With everything else being equal, then the tempo becomes faster - and you can hear this effect easily with dance music or electronica.
The second mechanism for altering the perception of tempo is about instrument separation and focus. One aspect of the M scaler is improved instrument separation, as one instrument does not modulate the timing of transients of another instrument. We hear this with a greater sense of separation, with instruments having greater power and authority. A loud instrument really stands out; and does not modulate other instruments. With conventional digital, we have a dominance effect, where one's attention is constantly switching to the loudest instrument; with an M scaler this problem is vastly reduced, so you can perceive quiet instruments when a louder instrument plays. This dominance effect, together with timing being modulated by other instruments, means that the sense of flow is interrupted; the music sounds mechanical and disjointed. When you use the M scaler, this problem reduces dramatically, so the music flows much more naturally. Also, because it reduces the dominance effect, the tempo actually sounds slower. Indeed, I once demoed the M scaler to a non audiophile, and they came back with something surprising - it sounded slower with the M scaler, and this was the effect they perceived the most.
Being able to reproduce timbre variations correctly absolutely requires sinc function accuracy filters, and this means 1M taps. Being able to reproduce flow and tempo accurately also requires 1M taps; so I do not agree that other DACs are capable of better tempo or timbre variations. And I have scientific facts to back up my assertions; it is a fact that we can only recover the original analogue waveform to guaranteed 16 bits accuracy with a sinc function and a million taps - something all other DACs completely fail to do.
