Chord Mojo(1) DAC-amp ☆★►FAQ in 3rd post!◄★☆

[Pimsilveira]

Welcome to the club.
Many of us have found that the Mojo reveals previously unheard details/instruments in music tracks, and leads us to revisit our music collections.
Don't get distracted by chasing HiRes music yet.
Standard red book CD res files, will now reveal far more than you ever imagined possible.
Mojo even makes well recorded MP3 sound magical.
Inevitably Mojo cannot work miracles with low bitrate, or badly recorded audio, but that is just an acknowledgement of crap in: crap out.

My thoughts exactly. I will try to resist loading hi-res files for now. Will start this process by listening to 320kbps mp3 and cd quality files and then I will “attack” those yumi hi-res beauties
The sound of this on my B&W P7 headphones is only comparable to my hifi system: two arcam 100w power amps, bi amping my B&W 805 Nautilus speakers!!
But now I can have this kind of sound in my pocket !!

 

[Paiceyfan]

My thoughts exactly. I will try to resist loading hi-res files for now. Will start this process by listening to 320kbps mp3 and cd quality files and then I will “attack” those yumi hi-res beauties
The sound of this on my B&W P7 headphones is only comparable to my hifi system: two arcam 100w power amps, bi amping my B&W 805 Nautilus speakers!!
But now I can have this kind of sound in my pocket !!

I am using 320kbps mp3 and Redbook right now... wonderful stuff. The provenance of hi-res files is dubious, so it's a risk making those purchases anyway right now. I hope it gets resolved. Have fun!

 

[krismusic]

Guys, I just received my Mojo today and I started listening to it half an hour ago...
Well, I only have 4 words to describe it,
IN, CRE, DI, BLE
I haven’t been able to close my mouth!!!
How is this kind of quality possible with such a tiny little thing??
I am going to have to listen to my digital music collection all over again. It never sounded like this!!
This blows my old Oppo ha-2 and HRT microstreamer out of the water. It is in another league.
Thanks Chord, I am a very happy customer
And I haven’t started exploring his-res files yet....

It's great that you are enjoying your music. I just thought it interesting that your experience is so different to mine. Although the same end result. My initial reaction to the Mojo was that I couldn't detect a specific improvement over the iPhone. Having listened to the Mojo for a couple of weeks I realised that I was enjoying my music in a way that I never did with the phone alone. This had continued for the year that I have owned Mojo. To me the difference is that Mojo communicates the emotion of the music. I'm still not certain that I could pick it out in a blind test but I wouldn't be without it.

 

[Mython]

Guys, I just received my Mojo today and I started listening to it half an hour ago...
Well, I only have 4 words to describe it,
IN, CRE, DI, BLE
I haven’t been able to close my mouth!!!
How is this kind of quality possible with such a tiny little thing??
I am going to have to listen to my digital music collection all over again. It never sounded like this!!
This blows my old Oppo ha-2 and HRT microstreamer out of the water. It is in another league.
Thanks Chord, I am a very happy customer
And I haven’t started exploring his-res files yet....

Welcome to the club.
Many of us have found that the Mojo reveals previously unheard details/instruments in music tracks, and leads us to revisit our music collections.
Don't get distracted by chasing HiRes music yet.
Standard red book CD res files, will now reveal far more than you ever imagined possible.
Mojo even makes well recorded MP3 sound magical.
Inevitably Mojo cannot work miracles with low bitrate, or badly recorded audio, but that is just an acknowledgement of crap in: crap out.

If you're up for a bit of late night listening with Mojo, here's a little something from 1977, which, even with Youtube's awful compression (and the fact it's a vinyl-rip, which usually makes me cringe!), ain't bad:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dEOvUAeYDw

 

[Deftone]

Thanks Chord, I am a very happy customer
And I haven’t started exploring hi-res files yet....

You don’t need to now you have Mojo.

 

[surfgeorge]

You should definitely check the upcoming Hiby R3. It is such a great device very similar in size of the Mojo and half the thickness. It supports Airplay, bluetooth 4.1 apt-X and they are working with Sony for the 96kHz/24bit capable LDAC codec. It also does lossless Tidal streaming and they are also working for the MQA support.

Any Mojo owner who is looking for a transport should definitely check it before buying anything else.

I am an early backer of the R3 on Kickstarter and have a Mojo coming and a Shanling L2 cable on order from Aliexpress.
I suppose end of May I'll be able to post pictures. I am planning to design and 3D-print a case for this combo. Should be a business card sized, 40mm thick "Sound Brick"
I only started researching headphone gear a few months ago, but I guess that will be a sweet combo.

 

[RiseFall123]

Chord Qutest

I think that my choice will be between:

- another Mojo
- Chord Poly (I will need anyway to switch it from main speakers rig to headphone but it will give me the comfort that I won't need to connect the iPhone as source because it supports Roon and Tidal natively)
- Chord Cutest

About the Cutest, I know it has filters, I need a warm sound, will the Cutest has an even more warm setting sound than the Mojo?

 

[daberti]

Welcome to the club.
Many of us have found that the Mojo reveals previously unheard details/instruments in music tracks, and leads us to revisit our music collections.
Don't get distracted by chasing HiRes music yet.
Standard red book CD res files, will now reveal far more than you ever imagined possible.
Mojo even makes well recorded MP3 sound magical.
Inevitably Mojo cannot work miracles with low bitrate, or badly recorded audio, but that is just an acknowledgement of crap in: crap out.

Ditto. Anyway a very good number of so called Hi-Res music is fake or crap in many ways.

 

[turkayguner]

Ditto. Anyway a very good number of so called Hi-Res music is fake or crap in many ways.

I agree with you. I have seen so many upsampled crap up to date.

I am an early backer of the R3 on Kickstarter and have a Mojo coming and a Shanling L2 cable on order from Aliexpress.
I suppose end of May I'll be able to post pictures. I am planning to design and 3D-print a case for this combo. Should be a business card sized, 40mm thick "Sound Brick"
I only started researching headphone gear a few months ago, but I guess that will be a sweet combo.

I am a super early bird backer for Hiby R3 as well. I was like, Tidal streamer which is not an android device? You serious? Boom joined the campaign right away. I have also bought the L2 USB c to micro USB cable from Ali site. The cable arrived and the only thing missing is the R3..

 

[AndrewOld]

Here is a HiFi News review of the roon nucleus which happens to show some measurements of a Mojo, and which would seem to show quite large variations in the jitter behaviour of the Mojo depending on the (USB) source.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-nucleus-review-in-hifi-news/41214

 

[daberti]

I agree with you. I have seen so many upsampled crap up to date.


I am a super early bird backer for Hiby R3 as well. I was like, Tidal streamer which is not an android device? You serious? Boom joined the campaign right away. I have also bought the L2 USB c to micro USB cable from Ali site. The cable arrived and the only thing missing is the R3..

Upsampling is just one thing.
Some add artificial frequencies beyond the recorded frequency range.
Some start from a 44/16bit recording, then go to 48/24 (with all problems that this implies) and just add another LP filter
The great majority do NOT use more than (best case actually detected in 5 years of work) 21 bits to SNR extents, having even as much as some 7 bits just containing noise (short red vertical lines in picture).
Some are full 24bit but cointain spuriae in the audible range (or just above as in the following link) which are treated with heavy notch filtering instead of selective Spectral Repairing. (Cut Off Frequency is correctly shown, but would require 200dB scale). Chasing game: from which original encoding standard did that PCM 88/24 came from? Chime in with your guess

And so on....
Streaming services are a no-no for me right for that. if interested I purchase and download one track of an album. Analyze it and THEN I purchase the album and download it (if all it is ok).

 

[Deftone]

This doesn’t look right at all

 

[turkayguner]

Upsampling is just one thing.
Some add artificial frequencies beyond the recorded frequency range.
Some start from a 44/16bit recording, then go to 48/24 (with all problems that this implies) and just add another LP filter
The great majority do NOT use more than (best case actually detected in 5 years of work) 21 bits to SNR extents, having even as much as some 7 bits just containing noise (short red vertical lines in picture).
Some are full 24bit but cointain spuriae in the audible range (or just above as in the following link) which are treated with heavy notch filtering instead of selective Spectral Repairing. (Cut Off Frequency is correctly shown, but would require 200dB scale). Chasing game: from which original encoding standard did that PCM 88/24 came from? Chime in with your guess

And so on....
Streaming services are a no-no for me right for that. if interested I purchase and download one track of an album. Analyze it and THEN I purchase the album and download it (if all it is ok).

Streaming is totally fine, for the music discovery at least. I purchase only the albums that I care most in CD format or buy hi-res versions only from the artists if they provide. I do not trust any other online site for hi-res downloads.

 

[musickid]

I switched to mojo 8 months ago and i feel like i've been on cloud 9 since. Stuff i loved listening to at 17 all had to be revisited one by one.

 

[Mython]

I switched to mojo 8 months ago and i feel like i've been on cloud 9 since. Stuff i loved listening to at 17 all had to be revisited one by one.

Mojo + (eBay/Amazon secondhand CDs) = massively increased music listening, in one's life!


Secondhand CDs are absurdly cheap at this point in time. Those of us who grew up during the 70s/80s/90s are lucky to be able to benefit by now buying-up old favourite albums, released during those years, for pennies.