Article: Chord Electronics Poly Review | Poly Come Home

[Patrick Cleasby]

On 1/12/2019 at 5:54 AM, deathdisco said:

Having a mojo/poly combo myself I have to say your experience matches mine 100%.

 

Easily the best ‘portable’ streamer/dac setup I’ve heard... but not for the faint of heart, or technologically lacking. Unfortunately the user experience let’s it down currently, making it way too cumbersome and inconvenient for me to recommend to ‘mainstream’/‘normal’ users

 

I agree with all of this wholeheartedly, but there is one observation any future readers of this should be aware of. As the Poly, like the Mojo is an FGPA device, in April 2019 Chord Electronics released a ground-up rewrite as FW2.0. Machines now ship at this level.

 

Dot releases since have taken us to 2.0.4 and nearly all of the functionality promised has materialised. While still tweaky to master, the Poly is now much more performant in areas including WiFi, Bluetooth, DSD, Gapless and the addition of native (slightly flaky) Tidal and Qobuz support.(Please contact me if you want any tips on what works, particularly in the area of the best MPD/DLNA client software for the lossless streamers).

 

For the naysayers, it deserves a reassessment..