When a Software Upgrade Renders Your Equipment Useless (Rant)

[Melvin]

Well, Chord Electronics is one such high end company that stopped USB driver development very shortly after their Qute EX was discontinued, only to be replaced by the 2Qute which is 2.0 compliant. The QuteHD was released in 2012 btw, followed by the EX in 2014. Pretty shitty for those of us stuck with a Yosemite driver.

[Melvin]

Older Chord products use USB interface licensed from M2Tech - which is same as the first hiFace. Driver for these is included in the official Linux kernel and thus should work for quite a while to the future too.

 

If you want to use a player on Mac and output to such DAC, solution is to use for example NAA with it. I just tested and my good'ol M2Tech hiFace works with microRendu as a NAA. Of course it should work with the other microRendu functions too.

 

Well, it's my understanding Chord hired away the driver guy from M2Tech to work on theirs exclusively. IIRC that was after Mavericks was released. Obviously Yosemite was next and that was the last driver that was developed. Didn't work for me in El Capitan. Haven't bothered to check since Sierra.

[Melvin]

I agree that it is frustrating to find that your device is no longer supported but if you use something which requires a custom driver don't you have a responsibility to check to be sure the driver is available before upgrading your OS?

 

Responsibility? Interesting take on that. I felt blindsided the 1st time the Chord driver broke. In fact, I think a lot of us were surprised and very disappointed. Big lesson learned. That being said, in Chord's case, they sold a boatload of their Qute HD and EX series DACs and stopped USB driver support only after a couple of years. IMO that is a lousy way to do business. They most certainly lost me as a customer and I sincerely doubt they care.