bflat
Headphoneus Supremus
Let me add one more thing here so I don't get crucified in the Mojo thread. My professional background is in silicon valley. Just because Chord uses an FPGA, that by itself is meaningless. All that means is that Chord uses a field programmable chip that they can program to do whatever they want. Only Chord knows how they do D to A conversion but for sure, it is not an R2R DAC like the ones Schiit makes. The mass suppliers for Delta Sigma DACs like Cirrus (I worked there once) would never use FPGAs because it would be cost prohibitive for the volumes that they do. Instead, they mass produce their Delta Sigma design right onto silicon wafers. An FPGA would take up an order of magnitude more silicon because it is field programmable whereas the mass produced ICs are hard wired. Chord doesn't have the volume to mass produce their own ICs because a wafer start costs a hundreds of thousands of dollars and the silicon fabricators will want millions in advance purchase orders before they will make your chips. One semiconductor line costs half a billion so that's not feasible for Chord either.
What this means is that the type of chip - IC or FPGA makes no difference to the quality of the DAC. It is only the design of the DAC circuit and who's to say that Chord has better engineers than Cirrus or AKM or others. Don't let the alphabet soup of fancy sounding acronyms make you think that one is superior to the other.
What this means is that the type of chip - IC or FPGA makes no difference to the quality of the DAC. It is only the design of the DAC circuit and who's to say that Chord has better engineers than Cirrus or AKM or others. Don't let the alphabet soup of fancy sounding acronyms make you think that one is superior to the other.