Chords New M -Scaler

[TheAttorney]

12 hours ago, ecwl said:

Since I have a Blu2, and @Miska has said that we can do similar and superior filtering using PCs with HQPlayer, I am excited to try HQPlayer out to:

1) See if I have a personal preference for specific filters, maybe even over Chord's

 

 

I did a HQP vs Chord DAVE upsampling comparison a while back, with HQP on i7 W10 laptop -> mR -> DAVE -> headphones. Always with redbook FLAC files.

 

Previously, I had heard the benefits of HQP's upsampling and filters when driving my iFi iDSD, and I particularly liked HQP's conversion to the higher DSD rates with this DAC, although my laptop struggled to reliably convert to DSD256 and above.

 

However, with DAVE (and its 167k taps), I preferred HQP to have all its upsamplig and filters switched off, i.e. let DAVE do all the upsampling. This was compared to HQP's highest upsampling and best filters. Not a night-and-day difference, but as it meant that I could keep my laptop's CPU usage to a minimum, it was a good result for me.

 

Much later on, I tried the M-scaler part of Blu2 on a weekend home trial, this time with Roon on my laptop, with the same redbook FLAC files. I was one of the few people who where somewhat underwhelmed by the Blu2: yes it sounded better, but not £8k better to my ears, particularly as I didn't need, or like, its CD section. However, I'll be giving the much lower cost Hugo M-scaler another go when it comes out, as the VFM is now much better for those that don't need the CD section. 

 

The interesting thing about my Blu2 experience was that there was no diminishing returns regarding the number of taps: I felt that going from DAVE's 167k taps to M-scaler's 250k or 500k was unremarkable. The biggest SQ boost came when going from 500k to 1M taps (but still not worth £8k for me at the time).

 

So, with some extrapolation of the above simple tests, I would say that any setting on HQP would struggle to compete with the M-scaler.

 

 

[TheAttorney]

1 hour ago, mav52 said:

One thing I do like about this M-Scaler idea,  it can be used with other dacs not just Chords products

 

Not really. The DAC needs to have dual BNC inputs, working in parallel, to get the full 1M taps effect.

Without that, the best you can get is 0.5M taps, which as has been said earlier, is nowhere near as good.

 

So in practice, only the most recent Chord DACs will get the full benefit of the M-scaler.