Portable Headphone Amplifier Reviews

Like peanut butter and jelly, some things are just meant to go together.

Portable audio DACs/Headphone Amplifiers/players can be a mixed bag of features, connections, format support (both wired and wireless), size and price.

Form factor and cost seem to be key determinants for many shopping around for a way to get better sound from their electronic devices.

The Chord Mojo($599 USD) has been the peanut butter on my list of portable DACs to audition for a while, so when I was offered one for review I was thrilled. When Chord threw in the Poly that is the jelly to the Mojo, things got serious.

The Mojo is as you may have guessed is a portable DAC/Headphone Amp, but it’s also so much more than that. Sure it does smartphones, music players, tablets or DAPs, but it also can be used with a PC or Mac, a games console or even a television — anything that can do audio-out via Coax, optical or USB.

All Chord products are designed and built in the UK. Speaking of build, the Mojo is built like a steel brick and its candy–coloued buttons indicate charge and sample rate being played back: 192kHz files will have you see blue. 44.1khz will have you seeing red.

First of all, just plugging my iPhone 6S and newly–arrived Audeze LCD-2C into a freshly charged Mojo (via an Apple Camera Connector and the supplied shorty USB to Micro-USB cable) brought about a night-and-day transformation to the depth, tonality, bass impact and upper register warmth/detail I was getting off some 24/44.1 320kbps mixes a DJ friend had made — never mind just bog–standard iTunes downloads.

The Mojo utilizes FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) DAC technology from its much larger, higher–priced and award–winning Chord siblings such as the Hugo and Dave. It also sports two 3.5mm headphone outputs.

So while the sound improvement was like going from black and white to color, utilizing this set–up meant rubber bands to strap the Mojo to the iPhone — which while it still fit into my pocket, was a bit cumbersome for accessing the phone’s screen.

Enter the ($749 USD) Poly: the Roon Ready wireless streamer built specifically to mate with the Mojo which can playback music from either an internal Micro–SD card at up to 768kHz and supports DSD256, WAV, FLAC, OGG VORBIS, ALAC, ACC, AIFF, WMA and MP3. It’ll stream via Bluetooth A2DP, Apple AirPlay, Wi-Fi or DNLA apps and has nine hours of battery life.

After an initial charging session of about four hours, I connected the Poly to the Mojo and was streaming via Bluetooth from my iPhone in about one minute.

Since I just received this gear the other day I’m going to run it thought its paces on all fronts and get back to you with a detailed review in a couple weeks.

In the meantime, Audeze sent me a giant candy box of headphones to review which I’ll be writing about in the next couple days and I also just received word that their Mobius is en route to me, so look for initial impressions of that next week as well.