Quote:
Originally Posted by AudioFi
I guess I can use the T2 as the streamer for the Hugo TT. I am not very familiar with the sound of chord Dacs but I’ve always heard good things. Is the Mscaler an upsampling device?
M
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To understand how the MScaler works, you first have to understand the secret sauce of Chord DACs which employ a custom filter that Watts designed. He’s been working on iterations of this for decades now.
The premise is that while Nyquist’s principle holds true in that the digitized 44.1kHz signal can capture all the frequencies up to half the sampling rate, the reconstruction of the analogue signal from the digital is flawed. This filter employs a number of “taps” that allows it to better approximate the “next” value in the signal. It’s more than just a simple upsampling.
In the past, the limitations of compute power meant he was limited in the number of taps he could use. In the DAVE he was able to get it to about 1/4 million taps vs tens of thousands in the lower models. That’s one of the reasons why the DAVE sounds better than the Hugo TT2 of Qutest.
With the MScaler he was able to use a newer processor that could do a million taps which was his end goal when he designed that filter decades ago. With that number of taps, he said the filter would be able to reproduce the original signal perfectly.
Rather than release a DAVE 2, he made the MScaler as an external box that would work for the DAVE and the Hugo 2 and Qutest as well