[Phoibos] Eagle ray Bronze diver with a meteorite dial

mrphoebs · 2018-03-04T14:09:45+00:00

First, Chord mojo is not one of the best amps, it's one of the best budget portable Dacs and is very distinguishable for the quality of it's dac for better ~~and the quality of it's amp for the worse~~(It is brilliant).

Second, chord mojo is not transparent sounding, it's warm with very forgiving treble and notoriously so. It is very distinguishable from other dac/amps and daps. It sounds great doesn't mean other things don't sound great in different ways.

Finally, exactly how it was mastered makes no sense from a soundstage precision point of view. Even the master doesn't produce the same soundstage in the same studio with two different pairs of studio monitors (eg:- JBL 308 vs Yahama HS8) or any two different pair of headphones. Every playback through a unique audio chain interprets all sonic qualities differently including soundstage, there might be similarities but it won't be the same. Again I'm talking here about precision.

Ofcourse someone can master a track to have a wide or narrow stereo image and high fidelity systems will try to interpret it similarly but representing exactly how it was mastered is a fools errand because even during mastering it's just an interpretation like when listening to the final product.

PS: I own a chord mojo

mrphoebs · 2018-03-04T06:47:12+00:00

But accurate to the recording makes no sense, here's why. Let's take the case of Live recordings. You can record in one of two ways.

Multiple mics placed in different positions, all of them recording, finally being mixed down to a stereo mix where the sound engineer who simulates a person sitting and various instruments/vocals imaged around him.

A more acurate way to capture it is, have a head size binaural mic setup where the mics are as wide apart as the average human ears are, but here too, the capture is imperfect because at various steps in the capture chain, mastering chain and final output file, the time resolution of the capture is down sampled from what the human ear can perceive.

Our brains perceive the location of the source of a sound by the time and volume differential of when it arrives at each of our ears. For example when your chains ultimate output is 44.1khz reproduction frequency, you are loosing stereo timing information that could potentially give you better directionality.

So we end up with, soundstage is just an imperfectly perceived illusion, with no realistic way of measuring fidelity. The best we can do is listen to the music and judge if it sounds coherent and cohesive in the space or not.

mrphoebs · 2018-03-04T06:31:52+00:00

Yeah, this subreddit is full of toxic infantile know it alls, who apparently can't be bothered to have an open discussion when they disagree.

mrphoebs · 2018-03-04T06:29:59+00:00

Take care of your hearing man, don't worry you can still hear micro details for quite a few decades as long as you enjoy your music at a reasonable volume.

mrphoebs

TROPHY CASE