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I don't know whether this is the right place to post this or not but since I have read this thread more than the other chord thread I like to share few things here, hopefully I am not too off the topic.
While I have not had the luxury to try DAVE I do currently own the MOJO and HUGO and I have extensively tried the TT despite my early bias that I had towards the creation of TT prior to listening to it which had stopped me really paying attention to TT.
Here are my take on the products mentioned above: I find MOJO an engaging product with one major weakness to me and that weakness is that MOJO has a distinct sound signature that tend to take precedence over the actual recording itself, ie/ MOJO sound signature is always present no matter what I feed it. Whether it is flac, DSD, mp3, aac to me they all sound so similar that it becomes an issue to me as I feel I dont hear the engineering effect of the album but what I am hearing is basically mojo sound signature.
do not feel the same with HUGO as in with HUGO I have the ability to on occasion know whether the file is lossy/lossless, whether it is recorded well, I feel with recording that recorded with smaller soundstage HUGO is able to portray that and with recording that has a larger soundstage HUGO can sound quiet expansive. With mojo soundstage always feels the same.
Now enters TT, which really changed thing for me. I could not understand why TT sounded so much different despite having the same main inner core as the HUGO. To me the improvement on lower frequency and ambiance on TT was the most obvious improvement.While I really dont know what lead to such improvement few members who I talked with suspect that TT has better power delivery management and that is what has resulted in improvement of sound.
So where Am I going with this? My question is will CHORD release a new HUGO based on the new FPGA chip used in Mojo? Or better to ask if we were to assume HUGO was to have the new Sparatan 6 used in Mojo what kind of improvement would we expect to hear?
Regards
Moe
TT has a super-capacitor, which Mojo and Hugo do not, so that might contribute to a difference in low-frequency presentation. Super-capacitors are expensive, so Chord wouldn't have incorporated any in the TT if it wasn't worthwhile to do so.
As for changing the FPGA chip, in Hugo, I doubt that would make any particular difference to the SQ, unless Rob felt inclined to change the code.
The code on Mojo has a lot in common with Hugo, but the WTA filter is intentionally different:
Just to correct things - it is a 15T that is used on the Mojo.
That has 16,640 logic cells and 45 dsp cores. 44 cores are used in Mojo.
The overriding design decisions were about power consumption, so although more DSP cores are used than Hugo, that's to reduce power, as the DSP cores are run at a much lower clock speed. To give you another example of lower power, with Hugo when I needed a bigger multiplier I used one DSP core with FPGA fabric (logic cells) added to create the larger multiplier. With Mojo, to save power, I used multiple DSP cores and no fabric to create larger multipliers.
Only the WTA filter is different, the rest of the audio path has Hugo code.
Rob