CHORD ELECTRONICS DAVE

Do you know if you can run power hungry headphones like the Susvara or Abyss from the Etude?

 

My Double Helix Cables (DHC) Prion4 cable is terminated for use with my Focal Utopia but I also use this cable with my HE1000v2 using DHC ultrashort hard adapters. These adapters are expensive but very well made. Looking at the DHC website I see that 2.5 to 3.5 adapters can be ordered (very expensive for non-DHC customers) and I expect they can also be ordered in some form from other cable manufacturers.

 

From the TT2 thread here is a little nugget posted today from the master himself comparing the TT2 to Dave and confirming the superiority of the Dave. Be wary of selling your Dave to get a TT2!!

 

I don’t know. But if I were to guess, I suspect Chord Etude can drive Susvara or Abyss. This is because I’ve seen people driving their Abyss with Simaudio HA430 or their LCD2 with Bryston B60 or Benchmark AHB2. Obviously you’ll need appropriate cable/adaptor. To be safe, it’s best to see what @Mojo ideas has to say about driving headphones with Chord Etude.

 

The Etude is a power amplifier, with no dedicated headphone socket(s).
The Etude user manual includes no references to headphones, only loudspeakers.
If you use it to drive headphones, you will have to connect the headphones to the sockets intended for speakers.
You would be connecting headphones that need tens/hundreds of milliWatts, to the sockets of a power amplifier that can output 150Watts.
You would have to be very careful to set the DAVE volume to nearly zero, otherwise you would quickly damage your headphones/hearing.
I agree it would be good to get some feedback from @Mojo ideas, regarding the wisdom of using the Etude to drive headphones.

 

Overnight, I’ve been debating this radical thought and wondering if I should be posting this. I used to say that if you love Dave and you can afford it, getting the Blu2 or now Hugo M scaler is a complete no brainer. Now replacing an amplifier in your system is a completely different situation because of DAC, maybe preamplifier, amplifier and speaker synergy. But for people who predominately listens to Dave using their speakers, I wonder if they should upgrade to the Chord Etude first before getting the Hugo M scaler, mainly because I think people might be shocked by their current loss of transparency from their Dave to their speakers. Obviously, because of system synergy issues, everyone should audition Chord Etude in their home first before making a purchase. Whereas I would feel comfortable recommending someone buying Hugo M scaler without an audition.

 

Did you try connecting your speakers to the phono outputs on DAVE? 2W is quite loud...

 

I wanted to but I did not in the end for two reasons. I don’t have the right adaptor to do the connection. And I was concerned that my speaker impedance might go too low for Dave and obviously I don’t want to fry my Dave. One observation I would make is that the loudest I’ve set the Dave with the étude was at -14dB when I was watching captain America Winter soldier on Netflix. I think Etude’s gain is about 28-30dB so I suspect Dave may not be able to drive my speakers alone. That said, most of the time, my Dave is set between -40 to -24dB.

 

Once the mscaler is added to tt2 however many important musical qualities become apparent that are not present in a standalone dave. Timbre, tempo and flow to name some and also instrument seperation. This makes the tt2/hms vs dave puzzle more challenging.

 

1. Are the listed "musical" qualities not present in a standalone Dave? I'm not sure what you mean?
2. Those qualities listed seem to be inspired from one of Rob Watts latest post over in the TT2 thread. In the same post he also expressed that some people would still prefer the standalone Dave over the HMS/TT2.

 

Out of curiosity, are DAVE owners that are considering purchasing an M Scaler leaning towards to the Blu Mk II or the Hugo M Scaler? It seems the Blu Mk II is moot and hard to justify now that there is a Hugo M Scaler. I wish Chord offered a standalone M Scaler that had the same Choral enclosure as the DAVE so it could be stacked or used in the Choral Ensemble stand.

 

I have a DAVE with the Choral stand.

I was tempted by setting up the combo with the Blu2 and another stand... A true beauty to behold IMO.

At the end I decided that I could not justify the expense, especially considering I don't listen to CDs anymore.

Also, all the discussion about the Blu2 "need" for ferrites or very expensive BNC cables scared me a bit.

My Hugo M Scaler is arriving this week, I am very excited and hope that it will sound great out of the box

 

The first 30 seconds I didn’t detect much difference from solo Dave, but after a short while things started to happen..

 

if you listen to cd's then the blu2 is the way to go...if not the new m-scaler is the ticket

 

I don’t know about that. If your current CD player or transport has bit-perfect Toslink output, I suspect hooking it up to Hugo M-Scaler would yield the same sound. But aesthetically, it wouldn’t look as nice as Blu2 by itself.