Прочие устройства — Chord Quartet

The Quartet is a digital upscaler from Chord Electronics of Kent, England, a two-box unit that sits between sources and a Chord DAC and raises the sample rate of incoming audio before conversion. It was designed by Rob Watts, the company's digital design consultant, took eight years to develop and was officially released on 21 May 2026 at a UK price of GBP 25,000. Chord calls it the most significant digital audio development in its 37-year history, and it is the first Chord upscaler to include an analogue-to-digital converter, so turntables and other analogue sources can pass through the same processing.

Key specs that matter

The core is the Blackbird WTA filter with four million taps, against one million in the earlier M Scaler, and Chord claims a tenfold gain in transient timing accuracy over its previous designs. Processing runs on five Xilinx 200T FPGAs with 3,700 DSP cores and more than two million lines of code written in-house, giving five times the computing power of the DAVE converter. Digital inputs are two BNC, two optical and one isolated USB-B, and two RCA pairs accept analogue signals. Outputs are two dual BNC links carrying up to 768 kHz, one optical at up to 192 kHz and one S/PDIF. A lossless 108-bit EQ at 705.6 or 768 kHz offers ten shelves with up to 18 dB of cut or boost, and latency can be programmed from 10 milliseconds to three seconds. The main unit is 7.8 cm high, 33.5 cm wide and 15.2 cm deep and weighs 3 kg, and the separate power supply weighs 3.2 kg. Consumption is 130 W at full power and 20 W in standby.

Engineering and use context

Chord computes the filter in hardware and deliberately avoids FFT convolution shortcuts. The Pulse Array ADC uses Chord's own decimation filters, so an analogue input is digitised before it meets the Blackbird filter and the EQ. Because the EQ works on shelves without adding phase distortion, broad adjustments to the balance of a system can be made in the digital domain. A separate power supply case feeds the main unit through a proprietary pinch-off RF filter intended to keep radio-frequency noise out of the processing. The Quartet is built in the UK and carries a five-year warranty.

Pairing

Chord states that the Quartet partners all of its DACs, and the dual BNC outputs are the route that lets the DAVE receive the highest-rate stream. The Qutest also accepts that rate through its paired BNC inputs, while a CD transport, streamer or computer connects to the coaxial, optical or USB inputs.

Alternatives

The Chord M Scaler is the earlier and smaller upscaler from the brand, built around a one-million-tap WTA filter.