Almost seven years after Chord Electronics “created the high-end portable DAC genre” comes the Mojo 2 at £449. New features include lossless DSP that is claimed to be “the first of its kind in the world”. Chord are calling UHD DSP, enabling comprehensive tone adjustments across the frequency range “fully transparent without any degradation in sound quality”. The new technology gives Mojo 2 “unrivalled” compatibility with today’s wide-ranging choice of headphones, regardless of type and sonic signature, plus flexibility with different source components and digital formats.
A further key feature is the introduction of a menu system. Navigated via an extra control sphere, the menu brings a mute function, four-setting cross-feed adjustment, a button-lock feature for travelling, plus tone controls. Digital inputs have increased to four with a USB-C data input alongside optical, coaxial (incl. dual-data for the M Scaler) and micro USB. Two 3.5 mm mini-jack headphone outputs allow up to two people to listen simultaneously.
Mojo 2 benefits from greatly improved battery management, thanks to an FPGA-based battery-charging system. This offers faster charging rates, coupled with a 75% reduction in power loss for cooler, more efficient charging. Capacity is up by 9%, resulting in better efficiency and improved battery life, which is now claims to be greater than eight hours. The so-called Intelligent Desktop Mode’ technology has also been improved, with an isolated battery and PSU redesign to support battery-free operation without any losses in sound quality, plus improved filtering and isolation.
Mojo 2 is now DC-coupled with a digital DC servo. It benefits from an improved WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter, now offering 40,960 taps, using 40 DSP cores. Additionally, an improved noise-shaper offers greater depth and detail perception, plus improvements to the 4e Pulse Array DAC introduce lower distortion and out-of-band noise.
UHD DSP uses a 104-bit custom DSP core running at 705/768 kHz: no other audio DSP offers the same accuracy. By using 104 bits plus extensive internal noise-shaping, Mojo 2 can deliver complete transparency by preserving the filtering of ultra-small signals. It enables fine-tuning across the full frequency range with 18 steps of adjustment per frequency banding: lower bass, mid-bass, lower treble and high treble. The volume control range has also been improved from +18 dB to -108 dB, and now benefits from two distinct operational ranges: low and high volume. A four-setting cross-feed function, also DSP-controlled, brings speaker-like spatial effects for flexible headphone listening.
The Mojo 2 is designed, engineered and handmade in the UK. It has bead-blasted aluminium casework, finished with a high-quality black anodise. Control is via four polychromatic polycarbonate control spheres (see colourful buttons). It remains compatible with Chord’s Poly streamer/server, enabling high-resolution streaming and up to 2 TB of solid-state library storage and playback when using the microSD card slot.