Nog een aanvulling op de volumeregeling van de Chord:
If that suggests digital volume, spot on. Alas, this isn’t the usual bit-decimating 24-bit on-chip affair which comes free and built into conventional converter silicon. That’s because Chord don’t do off-the-shelf chips. Instead, this volume control is part of their custom filter. Thus it’s written to a latest-gen Xilinx Spartan 6 field-programmable gate array. The latter’s ultra-low 0.7V power draw enabled Hugo’s original battery power concept in the first place. To learn at what resolution Chord’s attenuator operates—would it get lossy at high signal cut?—and how its presence might enforce DSD-to-PCM conversion, I asked head honcho John Franks for the juicy tech bits. “There’s no bit attrition whatsoever, hence zero loss. But I’m not really a digital designer. I just dabble in it from time to time. For the full Monty on this particular aspect, I’ll pass you on to Hugo’s designer Rob Watts.”
