Chord DAVE, Teil 2 http://www.hifistatement.net/tests/item/1681-chord-dave-teil-2
Chord DAVE, Teil 3 http://www.hifistatement.net/tests/item/1686-chord-dave-teil-3








When my DAVE finally arrived a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't sure what to make of my previous finding. How could the source truly not matter even though Rob Watts had insisted that it wouldn't matter? He stated he had figured out a way to make the DAVE immune to source jitter and to any RF noise coming from the source. In effect, what he was saying was that you could plug any old laptop into the wall with a cheap power cable and no special line conditioning or grounding and using a cheap $10 USB cable, it would perform equally to a CAD CAT or an $8,000 Aurender N10 with the DAVE. Rob insisted that all the DAVE needs is to be fed a bit-perfect file.那 CAD CAT 是 5,300 英鎊的『怪物』呀,怎麼『脫光光』的 Hugo 輸入跟『銅牆鐵壁』的 DAVE 輸入會如斯極端呢?
Second, I cannot overstate how good a job Rob has done isolating the DAVE against almost everything else. It seems to be immune and even impervious to all the things that significantly impact just about every other DAC I have experienced. When I first had the DAVE in my home in November, I had noticed quite oddly that my "dirty" Mac Pro plugged into the wall with a standard 18g computer power cord and connected to the DAVE via optical cable sounded as good as my highly optimized CAD CAT which was grounded to an Entreq grounding box and connected to an Audience aR6 line conditioner. I wasn't sure what to think of this back then and whether I could believe what I was hearing but because my time with the DAVE was so brief (only 48 hours), I convinced myself that I could have imagined it.
First of all, back in November when I first came into contact with the DAVE, my dealer and I did some testing. Something must have changed because we were able to directly connect an AQ Diamond optical cable directly into the DAVE back then and we compared it to my $120 Mapleshades optical cable alongside a $2,000 digital coax cable (I have forgotten which one). Back then, my dealer and I both agreed that optical sounded a little better than digital coax and that the less expensive Mapleshades sounded identical to the more expensive AQ Diamond. As I now compare my Mapleshades optical to the standard "made in China" optical cable that comes with the DAVE, I can detect no difference at all.