Friday, June 22, 2007

Chord RED Reference CD player

General public talks about MP3 and yet the audiophile companies keep pushing the Red Book CD boundaries. The latest high-end and stunning CD player comes from British Chord.

The single-box RED is based on Chord's Blu and DAC64. It employs a Philips CD Pro 2 transport mechanism (installed at 45 degrees), which is re-clocked using a highly accurate crystal oscillator. Upsampling rates are 44.1kHz, 88.2kHz, or 176.4kHz. As for the signal conversion to analog, I quote Chord's web-site: "Based on the DAC64 the digital signal is converted from 176.4KHz to analogue audio using 1024 tap filtering and 64 bit digital signal processing core. This is followed by 64 bit 7th order noise shaping, 2048 times oversampling rates and improved pulse width modulated elements. This gives much better measured performance, better detail resolution with a smoother more focused sound quality. The DAC also features RAM buffer technology that sequentially takes in all the data, re-times, it then sends it out giving jitter free operation. Digital data from other sources can also be fed into the RED via the optical or AES balanced XLR connections."

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