CHORD MOJO PORTABLE DAC / HEADPHONE AMPLIFIER REVIEW
 

CHORD MOJO

Chord's Mojo DAC / headphone amplifier, reviewed by Noel Keywood.

Announced at a Chord press conference in London, 14th October, 2015, Mojo is a new portable digital-to-analogue convertor (DAC) with volume control and headphone outputs, intended as an audio upgrade for mobile phones.
    After unexpected success with Hugo, a small £1000 portable DAC for use in the home, Chord told us that Mojo is even smaller and aimed at those on the move. The surprising news is Mojo costs just £399 – way below any other Chord DAC. And yet it uses their own, unique Watts Transient Aligned DAC technology that offers results few companies – globally – can match. 
    Mojo isn't simply Hugo crammed into a smaller case however. It uses a 26000-tap digital filter to reduce quantisation noise to negligible levels, where commercial DAC chips use 20 taps or so, designer Rob Watts told me. Mojo also has fully automatic input sensing and switching, making it digitally agnostic. Whatever you put in, it sees it, understands it and converts it to analogue automatically.
    Mojo can process conventional digital (PCM) up to 32bit resolution and 786kHz sample rate, way above current digital music file specifications. It can also sense and read DSD (Direct Stream Digital) running up to 4x the original data rate used on SACD – quad DSD as it is termed. This means it has massive processing power; most DACs only just manage the data rate needed to process  double rate DSD and 384kHz sample rate PCM, so Mojo is twice as fast as its hottest rivals.