Stacking Schiit Up and Finding One's Mojo

Strongly disagree. I do feel the amp is the weak link in the Mojo, but having compared it to a moby feeding a vali2, I preferred the Mojo. Moby has some shouty upper midrange, lower treble. As for treble crappiness, I do not get that in my system, but again, care must be taken with the usb input if using that. Shit usb cable can make shit sound.

 

i <3 modi multibit, for $250 can't be beat. very glad i swapped it in my office chain.

 

We look forward to your impressions.

I do not think, even if you do have a differing opinion, that EDIT: A potential labeling of someones impression as a "bad recommendation" is necessarily constructive.

We all hear differently and often disagree with what a fellow pyrate hears. We should know how to use our filters based on prior comparison of a persons publicly posted impressions to our own.
There are few absolutes in audio, unfortunately, so we all owe it to ourselves to hear as much shit as we can and form our own opinions.

 

FWIW, I preferred the Modi Multibit [not going to call it Momby, no way] to the Mojo in my setup by a reasonable margin. And for exactly the first two reasons that Ravi noted here were a problem with the other FPGA based Chord units he's heard (that I've expressed almost identically to 3-4 people on the forum via PM):

In my setup (then Modi/Mojo > Valhalla 2/Leckerton > HD650/friend's Paradox & HD800 SD), the claustrophobic lack of air was the real "dealbreaker" for me. Perceived stage depth was a little bit better on the Mojo than the Modibit, to my ears it came at the cost of overall field width and height.

I'd definitely agree with Torq's observations that the Mojo has better microdetail extraction than the Modibit. Torq gave the slight nod to Modi Multibit with regards to tonality here in his review.

In my own listening preferences, I put overall tone and timbral quality as very heavily weighted priorities for my listening criteria - well over microdetail. As such, I probably felt the gap was a bit bigger than what it was just because of prefs. I felt that the Modibit had a clear nod here, especially with vocals.

All that said, I do think the Mojo is the best all-in-one offering on the market right now. Yes, I'm including both the old model Geek Out V2 and the new Geek Out V2+ (that I recently received and then recently sold off) in that statement. The Mojo sounds as good as the V2/V2+, it's built way better, has more novel features/greater versatility, and has customer service that doesn't take a full lunar cycle to respond to a customer service ticket. And it was available for purchase without a one year wait. Beyond being the best available portable (IMO, YMMV, ATHH, etc. etc.) it's also a quite good desktop DAC and can very reasonably do double duty in a home setup.

You really can't go wrong with either the Modi Multibit or the Mojo and it's a pretty damn great time to be a budget conscious audio shopper.

 

@bixby 3-4 reports this year, dead as in battery replacement required.
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f...ugo-re-examined-20739/index25.html#post570459
http://www.head-fi.org/t/702787/chord-hugo/13590#post_12774366
http://www.head-fi.org/t/702787/chord-hugo/13590#post_12775095
http://www.head-fi.org/t/702787/chord-hugo/13545#post_12750475

 

@Madaboutaudio Thanks for the clarity

 

Per Chord's usual approach, quirky design for it's own sake seems to take precedence over ergonomic functionality. Mojo seems like its design is less than ideal for both desktop and portable use. One would think that it would be optimized for one or the other, presumably with the Mojo, given the presence of the battery and the amp section, portability is the primary use case envisioned, but the size/form factor are far from ideal for stacking with a source device. Dave is another example. Did they design it so that it had to be on the top of...whatever so that it would have to be in plain view screaming out "look how goofy I look, I must be really good." Like the Smucker's of audio.

 

I think of the mojo as more of a portable desktop amp/DAC. By this , I use mine off my laptop when I travel, and off my iPhone when I'm seated at a coffee shop or on a plane. That said, the lack of MFI is a deal killer for me, and I don't find the DAC on the mojo compelling enough for me to keep. I'm not that picky with my DAC or amp (nothing wrong with those that are, but my old ears aren't sensitive enough), so I'll stick with my iCan out of my laptop when I need extra power, or just use the iPhone directly.

That all said, I still think of the mojo as a laptop accessory rather than a phone accessoey, but maybe it works (ergonomically) better with android. It certainly is a conversation piece when people ask what it is.

 

Guess I was thinking of a phone and rubber bands, not a $900 dap. My bad.

 

How so few get bothered by this?
The crappy treble was the first thing I noticed about Mojo. Not like typical chinese Sabre, but as annoying. And yes, at the same time dull.
3 different computers didn't cure it, so it's not USB most likely.
I'd say the amp stage is alright. With some low ohm mid-fi phones the amp stage was competent, the dac though, not for me. HD650 and HD800 are both terrible from Mojo.
The plus points are fairly good slam, fast transients and while not accounting lowest and topmost octave clarity is good.

 

This thread seems to be devolving into a (pointless) argument over the Chord Mojo.

The Mojo's biggest problem, by far, is that it's been shilled mercilessly by a horde of driveling, half-deaf cretins. But that doesn't make it a shitty unit in its own right. I enjoy mine on a regular basis. But it's not gonna replace my desktop rig. Nor, frankly, should it be expected to.

Don't really see why there's so much controversy, honestly. If something about the Mojo's physical shape shocks and/or offends you, there's, like, a gazillion other options in this product space to explore. Maybe do that?

 

Keep those dislikes coming folks. Tells me I am doing something right.

 

@Torq: A bit off topic, but would you mind expanding on how you found the Vali/Lyr 2 within the context of this comparison? Obviously, both were sufficiently transparent to yield solid impressions. But did you find the Lyr to offer any advantage in this respect? Or were the myriad differences in the DACs more-or-less equally detectable on both amps?

For what it's worth, I agree with many of your findings regarding these DACs. I've owned a Moby, Bifrost Multibit, and Mojo myself. Still have the latter two, although I expect necessity will someday require me to pick up another Moby. I found the Moby to sound better out of the box than the Bifrost Multibit, but after an certain amount of "burn in," both units wound up resembling each other so closely that I, like yourself, probably wouldn't be able to reliably differentiate them from each other.

Stupid burn in. Still think it's probably (mostly) imaginary.

 

I'd be happy to, though I'm going to wait until I'm actually at a proper keyboard to do so! Just wanted to post quickly acknowledge the request in the mean time!

 

Just to clarify for everyone, the Mojo does not have an "amp section." It's a one piece thing, and if I understand it correctly, it's essentially a DAC (not on a chip) that simply has [widely] variable power output. As a result, it's impossible to double amp with the Mojo (unless of course you use a Mojo plus two external amps, but that's getting silly).

I'm surprised by all the complaints about the Mojo's treble, I've not heard anything like it before (heard as in "other people saying it" as well as "listening to my own Mojo").
Even as a fan of the unit, I do have to agree with the "limpdick" bass characterization. I find myself reaching for my GOV2+ for bass-heavy music. I hate many things about the GO, but I adore its bass reproduction.

 

First, you want to go introduce yourself ... in this thread.

And then ...

While it's not an "amp" section in the traditional sense, there are half a dozen discrete transistors in the output section following the raw output off the DAC, so there's a bit more going on that it being a "one piece thing".

At least according to it's designer.