Chord have done it, breaking the one million filter coefficients with their M Scaler. To be precise, there are 1,015,808 interpolation filters to draw out as much information from a digital audio stream as physically possible. Compared to their flagship DAC, 'DAVE', which ‘only’ uses 164,000 taps in their digital processing and other oversampling DACs that have a few hundred coefficients at most, that makes the M Scaler something to pay a level of respect to.
But what does this actually do? It’s not a DAC, but rather an upsampler. That means it takes a digital signal and outputs another signal to be processed by a DAC. The result is a very transparent, but noticeable boost in performance. With CD quality at 44.1 kHz, you can upsample to much higher sample rates, up to 768 kHz (over 17 times CD quality!).
We compared this upsampling to respective high-resolution audio to see how it performs and we were not disappointed. It was taken further by running high-resolution audio through the M Scaler to receive an even greater boost in performance and an almost life-like performance. Once you've heard your favourite music through the M Scaler it is almost impossible to turn it off, let alone live without it.
Chord Electronics has worked on overcoming the physical limitations of coaxial digital cables and employ a dual BNC connection which can be paired with either the Qutest, Hugo TT 2 or DAVE, or single BNC Coaxial to work with most DACs. This means to get the most from the M Scaler it needs to be paired with the aforementioned Chord DACs, but is still able to be used with a DAC you may already own.
Priced at £3495, this is available for demonstration and to order in either black or silver.