Chord Quartet

The Chord Electronics Quartet is the most advanced digital upscaler Chord has ever produced and, by the company's own account, the most significant digital audio product in its 37-year history. At its heart is the all-new Blackbird WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter, the result of 46 years of research by digital design consultant Rob Watts, running four million taps across five Xilinx FPGAs to reconstruct the timing of a recording with an accuracy that conventional digital technology cannot approach. The new flagship of Chord's Choral system. Made in the UK.

Type and Technology

Reference-class digital upscaler with a built-in analogue-to-digital converter. The Blackbird WTA filter uses four million taps, implemented directly in hardware across 5x Xilinx FPGAs rather than via FFT convolution, a tenfold increase over the one-million-tap filter of the previous Hugo M Scaler and roughly five times the FPGA processing power of the flagship DAVE. Nearly all of the filter's mathematical coefficients reach the theoretical sinc-function ideal for perfect reconstruction. In a first for a Chord upscaler, a custom Pulse Array ADC brings turntables, tape, and other analogue line-level sources into the upscaling path, using proprietary decimation filters to eliminate aliasing from its 104 MHz noise-shaper output. A 108-bit, ten-shelf lossless digital EQ, first seen in the Mojo 2, offers plus or minus 18 dB of adjustment with no loss of resolution. Designed to partner every Chord Electronics DAC and to unlock the full 768kHz capability of the DAVE. Made in the UK.

Sound Character

The Blackbird WTA filter's effect is described as transformational rather than incremental. Instruments acquire a tangible presence and a more natural sense of timbre, bass pitch becomes cleaner and better defined, and reverberation and spatial depth, the sense of a real acoustic space, are markedly improved. Through the built-in ADC, analogue sources are preserved with the fine timing cues the brain relies on to map a soundstage, so vinyl and master tape are rendered with studio-grade transient accuracy rather than sounding flattened or mechanical.

Build and Finish

A two-box design, pairing the upscaler with a separate Rob Watts-designed power supply whose proprietary pinch-off RF filter architecture delivers the low-noise purity normally associated with battery power from a mains-connected unit. Programmable latency from 10 milliseconds to three seconds simplifies audio-visual integration. Precision-machined aircraft-grade aluminium, available in Argent Silver or Jett Black, and supplied with a five-year warranty. The matching Choral Ensemble Stand System is available separately.

Best For

The most committed digital listeners, and DAVE owners in particular, who want to extract the last measure of timing accuracy from their system, along with anyone who wants to bring a turntable or tape source into Chord's upscaling domain for the first time.

What's in the Box

• Chord Quartet upscaler
• Rob Watts-designed external power supply
• Power cable
• Documentation

Specifications