Chord Dave or Ayre QX5 Twenty DAC???

I got no skin in the game but know of and have heard both of these companies fine products, both have some good strengths, we used to sell Chord and do not now sell them so we have no skin in the game nor do we sell Ayre. 

There is one advantage that the Chord Dave has the Aqua Hifi Dac have that the Ayre doesn't.

The Chord is FPGA based and is easy to update, the Forumla is designed on all separate boards and Aqua has shown they can and will offer reasonably priced updates, I haven't heard the Forumla but we have the Lascala and it is excellent I haven't heard the Forumla I will say that the Lascalla is excellent. So one thing I would ask with the Ayre, is how easy would it be to upgrade?

Aside from sound quality, ease of upgrading, in the turbulent world of digital is a very good thing. 

For those on the East Coast we, Audio Doctor have one of the largest collections of digital gear on display: we display: Lumin, Aurender, Mytek, Aqua, EMM Labs, Light Harmonic, Baetis, Cary Audio, T+A, Nad, Naim, Nuprime and a few others. For those who haven't heard the Light Harmonic Davinci is amazing and we have one of these rare dacs!

Troy
Audio Doctor
www.audiodoctor.com old website new one coming soon
877 428 2873

No the difference between the Ayre's FPGA and the Chords are too totally different design concepts, they share one common thing an FPGA can hold a set of programming instructions, like RAM.

Ayre is a Chip based Dac, and uses a specific Dac chip, and runs its own programing for filtering.

Chord uses an FPGA which runs everything, they do not use an AKM or ESS or Burr Brown dac chip, not a single oneso in terms of upgradability every parameter is instantly unpgradable.