CHORD
Chord Mojo 2
C
hord Electronics claims credit for creating the high-end portable DAC genre due to its release of the now-famous Mojo portable DAC almost a decade ago. The company’s long-standing digital design consultant, Rob Watts, has now revisited, re-imagined and re-engineered that award-winning original with groundbreaking, world-first technology to create the Chord Mojo 2. The new Mojo 2 benefits from several new features, chief of which is a revolutionary lossless DSP, the first of its kind in the world. The innovative new ‘UHD DSP’ is fully transparent, enabling comprehensive tone adjustments across the entire frequency range without any degradation in sound quality. This new technology gives the Chord Mojo 2 unrivalled compatibility with today’s wideranging choice of headphones, irrespective of type and sonic signature, plus flexibility with different source components and digital file types. We here at LWA are very pleased to be able to say that Chord and Watts have finally (after much nagging) added a menu system via a new (fourth) polychromatic polycarbonate control sphere that allows you to control a mute function, a foursetting cross-feed adjustment (which generates speaker-like spatial effects for flexible headphone listening), a buttonlock feature for when you’re commuting, plus those fully lossless tone controls we mentioned previously. Chord has also increased the number of digital inputs on the new Mojo 2. There are now four, with the added input being a USB-C data input. The other inputs are optical, coaxial (including dual-data for the M-Scaler) and Micro-USB, plus there’s a Micro-USB charging input. On the output side, there are two 3.5 mm mini-jack
headphone outputs so two people can listen to music simultaneously. Mojo 2 has a new FPGA-based batterycharging system with a 9 percent higher capacity than the original Mojo, which means battery life is now longer than eight hours, and the charging rate is much faster than before. Sound quality has also been further improved through the use of an improved WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter that now has 40,960 taps (the technical indicator of how complex the interpolation filter is), using 40 DSP cores and an improved noise-shaper that offers greater depth and detail perception, plus improvements to the 4e Pulse Array DAC introduce lower distortion and less out-of-band noise. Watts says that the Mojo 2’s proprietary ‘UHD DSP’ technology uses a 104-bit custom DSP core running at 705/768 kHz.
“No other audio DSP offers the same accuracy,” he says. “By using 104 bits plus extensive internal noise-shaping, Mojo 2 can deliver complete transparency by preserving the filtering of ultra-small signals while at the same time enabling fine-tuning across the full frequency range with 18 steps of adjustment per frequency band: low-bass, mid-bass, low-treble and high-treble plus improved volume control range.” Completely designed, engineered and handmade in the United Kingdom, the Chord Mojo 2 has a high-grade, beadblasted black anodised aluminium case. Price: $899 The arrival of the Mojo 2 means we are running out our remaining stock of the original Chord Mojo ($799 RRP) for just $599.
15
