Firstly, a big thank you to all of our wonderful customers for keeping us so busy throughout the festive season. Our successful campaign against ongoing Brexit gloom didn’t leave us time to post blogs for a while, but far be it from us to complain about buoyant business!

Now the decorations are packed away we have finally had the chance to pay more attention to some recently arrived new products. One which has really grabbed our attention is the Chord Hugo M-Scaler an utterly amazing digital audio upscaler capable of taking standard CD 44.1kHz resolution all the way up to 705.6kHz and an even more impressive 768kHz from 96kHz input when used with Chord’s dual BNC DACs, Qutest, Hugo TT 2 and DAVE.

We are fortunate enough to have a demo DAVE DAC in store so linked it up to our new M-Scaler.

The music streaming source was an Auralic Aries Mini, connected to M-Scaler with a Chord Shawline USB cable, giving us access to high resolution music files from both Tidal Masters and Qobuz Sublime.

Using Chord Shawline XLR cables, we hooked DAVE up to our mighty Chord SPM1050 Mk 2 power amp.

We currently have a pair of Reference 1 speakers on loan from KEF for evaluation and thought this system would be ideal to put them through their paces.

We were right! Even from cold, with both M-Scaler and KEF speakers requiring running in, this system sounded stunning. Actually, the system itself disappeared, leaving just the music, alive and tangible in the room. There was no hint of edginess or harshness. Digital has never sounded this good, or so analogue! Digital designer Rob Watts has been chasing 1 million tap length filters for many years, believing that this was what was required to reproduce 44.1kHz audio properly with accurate transients. M-Scaler with DAVE achieves this. Having heard the results we have no reason to doubt Rob’s thinking.

This system plays music effortlessly. It has all the attributes of a high end vinyl based system with none of the downsides. The initial purchase costs aren’t trivial but long term ownership would be less fussy than an esoteric turntable and cartridge with minimal maintenance by comparison. It’s food for thought…

We love great music, whatever the source, and really want to share the musical nirvana this fantastic system provides.

Just call or email us to book a demo. You won’t be disappointed!

See you soon,

Alan, John and Wayne - Audio T Southampton

Chord Electronics Hi-Fi is available from the following branches of Audio T:
Brentwood, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Enfield, Manchester, Online, Oxford, Portsmouth, Preston, Reading, Southampton, Swansea, Swindon