Stars Picker Audio Library had distinguished company this afternoon when John Franks, owner and chief designer of Chord Electronics, and Rob Watts, the digital design consultant, turned up for a talk on the company and its new products and also to launch the Chord Ultima integrated amp.
What was most interesting was that John revealed that the company will be launching a preamp and a power amp called Suzi at the Munich High End show in a few months’ time. He even showed Malaysian audiophiles what they look like.
Rob revealed that he is working on a new scaler to be called Quartet Scaler to match with the flagship Dave DAC. It will still upsample music files to 768kHz just like the M Scaler, but there is a lot more going on inside the circuitry, and in simple language, it has to do with making the transients and timing as close as possible to the original recording. When Rob starts talking about digital conversion of analogue sound, I have to admit that it is very difficult to understand him.
John said the Quartet Scaler will cost more than the Dave DAC and hopefully will be launched at the Munich High End as well. The new scaler with the Dave DAC will push Dave’s performance to an even higher level and ensure that the shelf life of the Dave DAC will be lengthened by many more years as Chord has no plan now to make a Dave 2.
After the briefing and Q&A session, the attendees entered the demo to hear the Chord Dave DAC and Chord Ultima integated amp driving a pair of Dali standmount speakers.
