Chord M-Scaler and Should I Want One?

I wouldn’t say the M-Scaler is about clarity. It’s more about weight, balance and a certain relaxed naturalness. 

i agree with this... with the right accompanying dac (in my case the hugo tt2 or an older musical fidelity trivista), it is about a sense of ease and naturalness, a richness of tone added to the sound.... in effect, more analog sounding less digital, as if the bits are glued together more nicely

@nyev

i have not tried plugging the m scaler into the weiss

reason being daniel weiss states that the 501 does internal clocking and upscaling input signals at 195 khz -- which was chosen by them as what they felt optimized the sound, so in effect, the weiss (like many better dacs) does internal upscaling to enable what they feel is the most ideal reconstruction filtering of the signal in the conversion process - as you probably know, the upsampling allows for the final filters to work ideally so one should be optimized to the other in the design process

maybe one rainy day this winter when i am very bored i may well try feeding the weiss with the scaler

I don't often put much credence in Amir, but he found there was no benefit to upscaling.

well that settles it, right?  🤣

rob watts clearly states the scaler and tt2 models were developed in the same time frame, in some ways the fpga code for conversion and filtering written into the tt2 is optimized for the scaler fronting it... otoh dave has even more computing power but was a predecessor in deveopment time frame by a couple years, not to say there isn’t benefit to be had with an upscaled input feeding it...

my experience is the simply that the scaler feeding the tt2 makes it smoother and more spacious sounding, yet with no loss of detail/micro-dynamics, transients are more effortless and cleaner/more natural - the term i have used in an earlier post iirc is that somehow the musical ’bits’ seem glued back together more like the real thing, more seamlessly, with the scaler working

conversely, removing the scaler makes the tt2 sound more hifi -- more treble energy but in a glare-y sense, music seems sharper and more uptight - on my system the difference is immediately noticeable, no need to strain to hear it (which can be the case in trying to hear the difference among other finer dacs, say for instance, weiss 501 vs bricasti m1se)