That’s great to hear. Do you know if that’s the Chord authorized service center on the west coast? I’m happy to send them my two units. Even if I decided later to sell my pair, I’d like the units to be serviced so the next owner doesn’t have to go through the same issues.
At some level, I understand your struggles. When I first got my Blu2 in 2017, my dealer and I struggled to get a good working unit for a few months and had to send the units back to Chord until one works perfectly. And it’s been working perfectly fine since then. But that was from their initial production run and we suspect the shipping from UK to Canada was sometimes rough but we weren’t sure. I never publicly posted this because I really haven’t seen a lot of people complain about this problem on the forums here. Possibly one person per year max, probably less. I have personally contacted them via PM’s and eventually their problems got resolved. So I don’t think there is a massive failure rate for Blu2.
And Blu2 is definitely a little more sensitive to RF noise so I have found it can be finicky if you’re using the S/PDIF or USB inputs of Blu2 depending on your USB or S/PDIF source.
And I have to admit, because even with multiple USB source upgrades, I can’t completely get rid of the RF source noise (unless I run the system off my iPad which I didn’t want to), I ended up switching to an M-Scaler and eventually to feeding the M-Scaler Toslink.
Unfortunately, this is where my sympathy ends. You’ve said in your previous posts, you bought the Blu2 used, instead of M-Scaler as recommended by your dealer. Mostly you did it for aesthetic reasons (Iike I did as I kept my Blu2 till 2020 for the same reasons when I finally decided to switch to M-Scaler even though I never use the CD transport).
To me, it’s not even clear that Blu2 or DAVE is not working properly. It sounds like you’ve said if you use your sources directly with DAVE or if you feed a non-USB source to Blu2 via S/PDIF and play through DAVE, it works fine. I can’t figure out from your posts how the CD transport is broken. Usually BNC1/2 or BNC3/4 would work consistently, you just need to find which one and use that (I use my BNC3/4 because BNC1/2 is not as reliable). I guess you can call it a “defective” product. But if it runs 100% of the time BNC3/4, I’m fine with it.
To me, if you have nothing plugged into Blu2 and you just use the Blu2 as a CD transport into DAVE with a functioning BNC1/2 or BNC3/4 using the stock BNC cables and if it consistently runs normally, your Blu2 is not broken. Maybe there is something wrong with your USB source. It’s not a software issue. It’s your USB source RF noise issue.
On the other hand, if you plug your battery-powered iPad into the USB source and once in a while, there is distortion to the audio, or if you play CDs and once in a while, the CD skips because of the transport or the CD seems to play fine but the DAVE has audio distortions, then yes, your Blu2 is 100% broken. But Chord has 5-year warranty that’s transferable from original owner to new owner as long as you have the original owner’s receipt. So to me, you can just get the warranty. Unless you didn’t ask the original owner to provide you with his original receipt. But that’s not really a Chord problem. That’s a “I bought a used product” problem. Heck, maybe the person who sold you the Blu2 knew it was broken. Maybe the person who sold you the Blu2 broke the Blu2. You seem pretty confident it’s Chord and its “software” problem.
I totally understand that your bad experience has soured you on Chord products. I was equally frustrated the first few months in 2017 with the Blu2. But eventually Chord sorted the product out. So far, I have never heard you say what happened when you actually try to get the Blu2 into warranty repair in the UK. I’m just hearing that you want Chord to open a West Coast repair shop which we all know is not going to happen. I’m sorry that you have a bad experience with a used product. I think it’s reasonable to vent and see if somebody in this forum can help you out. But taking out all your frustrations in this thread with repeated posts doesn’t actually fix your product problems.
Anyway, best wishes with the warranty repair.