If Chord was really business savvy they would strike a deal with Fiio and develop a DAP with them. Imagine something like the M11 with Chord's DAC in it. Or even better, do it with LG so I can also use my DAp to make phone calls
I would love to see a kind of docking station for desktop use. The dock would have reg. component outputs, power input and maybe use a magnetic port connection.
It would allow the user to have multiple dock setups (home, office) and still use it for portable without having to worry about USB port fatigue. Also reduce the need for adapters to go from 3.5 to (your port of choice). Pocketable for the commute in the morning, then throw it on the dock at work which presumably your headphones or speakers are already plugged into. The power could bypass the battery and allow for low battery degradation when in constant plug in use.
If Chord was really business savvy they would strike a deal with Fiio and develop a DAP with them. Imagine something like the M11 with Chord's DAC in it. Or even better, do it with LG so I can also use my DAp to make phone calls
That would actually be the most stupid thing ever, one that would be made by management that only looks at short term profit but not the long term business prospects, and thankfully Chord isn't like that.
The only thing that makes Chord products like Mojo and Hugo special is the secretly guarded software written by Rob Watts that resides inside the FPGA chip, even the FPGA chip itself is nothing special which anyone can buy from Xilinx and burn in their own digital-to-analog algorithm. Any risk that could lead to losing Rob's software and source code would literally make Chord go bankrupt as they lose their secret weapon, and partnering with any rival OEM like Fiio will exponentially increase that risk.
The best thing Chord can do and is doing right now is keeping their stuff as secret as possible and only let others connect to their devices externally and can only see their device as nothing but a black box.
Is it really? A third party wouldn't need access to FPGA chip programming for that. I didn't hear about Sabre or other hi-fi audio chips going out of business for working too closely with Fiio, A&K or LG.
Is it really? A third party wouldn't need access to FPGA chip programming for that. I didn't hear about Sabre or other hi-fi audio chips going out of business for working too closely with Fiio, A&K or LG.
That's because AKM and ESS Sabre DAC DACs chips are build using physical transistor gates, and OEMs buy fully formed and completed chips from them. To reverse engineer AKM or Sabre DAC chips, you'll need to di-package the DAC chip (difficult to do without breaking anything) and examine the chip transistor layout using electro-microscope to see the physical gate layouts (millions of those on a chip) and connection (billions of those) in the chips, copy that design but still have your own chip fabrication capacity (or source someone to do it for you) to replicate that tech, and none of that is cheap or easy. (You can copy that design and program it using FPGA, but then just buying a FPGA chip would be at least 5-6 times more expensive than buying the chip from AKM or ESS itself, combined with all the previous efforts then why bother?)
If you have the source code for an FPGA, you can burn your own FPGA chip with nothing more than a desktop PC and a standard FPGA connection kit purchased from Xilinx with a few clicks of a button. That's what the F and P standards for - field programmable. You use software to draw up the transistor gate layout virtually on a PC, the software translate that into codes which the chip can then interpret within itself. If you don't give completely formed chips to Fiio or whom ever, whenever they request a change in the programming could give them clues to how the FPGA is programmed and a chance to reverse engineer the code, the risk is much higher and the barrier to replicate the tech is several orders of magnitudes lower - again if I have the code, for less than 10k I can duplicate the FPGA chip used in the Mojo or Hugo - and then just open up a Mojo and copy the electronics inside are you are done, compared to the millions alone that you would need to copy an AKM or ESS Sabre DAC chip.
Completely different beast and technology at work here.
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