x RELIC x
Headphoneus Supremus
Another review...kinda meh:
http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/chord-electronics-mojo-portable-dacheadphone-amp/
(Sorry if already posted...hard to keep up!)
I like this part that he writes about the sound of Mojo.
"When I say the Mojo sounds natural, I mean that it renders musical timbres, textures, and transient sounds in a wonderfully believable and unforced way. As you listen, there is less a sense of being in the presence of bowls-you-over grade ‘great hi-fi’ and more a sense of effortless connection with the real-world sounds of human and instrumental voices. In short, the Mojo invites listeners to focus less on the constituent elements of sounds and more on the overarching whole. Note that this does not imply any sort of lack of transient or harmonic information, since the Mojo does a terrific job on both counts. Rather, it is more a matter of proportion and balance; instruments and voices simply sound like themselves, without any artificial spotlighting or underscoring of their sounds merely for ‘dramatic effect’. It’s the sort of quality you might not notice in the first 30 seconds of listening, but after enjoying a track (or album) or two one gradually becomes aware that virtually every piece of musical material the Mojo touches seems to come out sounding spot on.
This quality became most apparent to me in listening to pianist Alfred Brendel’s performance of Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor [Mozart: Favourite Works for Piano, Philips]. One of Brendel’s great gifts—especially for this music—is that his performances typically are less about pianistic flash and pyrotechnics, and more about subtlety, fluidity, and masterful touch. The Mojo played right into this schema as it, too, is capable of revealing (but never overplaying) almost infinitesimal shifts in phrasing, dynamics, and—here’s that word again—touch. When you listen through a Mojo, you can’t help but sense that you and your music are in good hands.
The Mojo’s organic quality focuses specifically on the timbres and distinctive attack and decay characteristics that are the defining ‘signatures’ of the instruments we enjoy hearing. To borrow a term from contemporary architectural discussions, I found the Mojo handily reveals the ‘materiality’ of the instruments in play. Thus, acoustic basses sound realistically large and ‘woody’, trumpets sound incisively articulate and ‘brassy’, tubular bells sound, well, believably tubular and ‘metallic’, and so forth. These might seem like perfectly ordinary things that all DACs and amps should do, but in my experience they are not as simple or ordinary as you might think. The difference I mean to point out involves the quality of authenticity; many DAC/amps can give you a fair simulacrum of the real thing, but the Mojo (like the Hugo before it) steps things up several notches in terms of realism, believability, and timbral accuracy."[/i}