New Chord CrimsonPlus

It has often been said that designing a budget hi-fi product is far harder than a cost no object state-of-the-art gargantuan product.

To design a budget cable that is genuinely a significant improvement over its predecessor is a tough task. To make it better in communication of music as well as traditional hi-fi [...]

New Chord HDMI Active

To follow the success of Chord’s award-winning HDMI Silver Plus, and the recently introduced, performance-on-a-budget HDMI SuperShield, was always going to be an interesting challenge. Chord considers that they have ridden the bucking bronco of performance and have produced a refined thoroughbred that will enhance the viewing pleasure of the enthusiast – the new HDMI Active. Interestingly, the most significant improvements with the HDMI Active are the sound quality of the new [...]

SuperShield – Chord’s new budget HDMI cable available now

Chord’s new and extremely pretty SuperShield HDMI is available now.

It’s targeted at the entry-level end of the specialist market where the performance:price ratio is absolutely critical.

But entry-level at Chord is just an expression that means a greater challenge

The SuperShield is HDMI 1.3b certified.

It uses 26awg oxygen free copper conductors for high conductivity, and low density [...]

Another DacMagic power supply trial

Decided to use Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, but slightly more unusually the DVD-A rip so the source is 24/96. Unlike quite a few DVD-A’s this one appears to have some content above 22k. Amazing though that given the total available dynamic range they still needed to ‘clip’ the recording. Still sounds rather good though.
To start I compared the standard power supply with the MaplinL54BR. Pleasant surprise, the Maplin delivers a subtlety of delivery that doesn’t emphasise any particular instruments. The original in comparison seems to make the bass line and the hi-hat a little more obvious in the mix of Dreams and decreases the importance of Stevie Nick’s [...]

HDMI cable silences my listening room

The experiment was to move the PC outside my listening room and then to use a 5m Chord HDMI and 5m USB cables to control and monitor the PC.
The worry was running a good monitor at 1920 by 1200 over a 5m HDMI cable. Would the image quality be reduced? The image was absolutely fine and so much so that I temporarily tried a 10 m cable which worked just as [...]

Ideal for dinner parties: the Wadia 170iTransport?

Performance from the Wadia 170iTransport using the Behringer was absolutely ideal for dinner parties and background music. There was absolutely no chance of anyone being dstracted by any emotion from the music. The best results were with the Behringer upsampling to 24Bit 88.2k before doing it’s D to A [...]