FEBRUARY 2022 T3 29Opinion
ompletely out of the
blue, I was sent a Chord
Mojo 2 this Christmas.
What a gift! It’s a
headphone amplifier and DAC
(digital to analogue converter) and
if you are interested in hi-fi at all,
you’ve probably heard of it. And if
you aren’t, you may have no idea
what I’m going on about. To put it
in layperson’s terms, it takes the
music coming out of your phone
and makes it sound like a million
dollars. It’s a sonic rocket up the
arse of dull-sounding digital tunes.
However, it does involve
strapping a cigarette-box-sized
device to your phone, and then
plugging in proper, wired
headphones. And often this
involves going via an adaptor as the
headphone socket on the Mojo 2
are the small ones, and most
proper headphones have a big jack.
Hope the language I’m using here
isn’t too technical for you or
anything. So clearly the Mojo 2, for
all its audible excellence, is not for
everyone. It is bloody good though.
Getting an improved version
of your technology can be a
dangerous thing, mind. It can lead
to terrible regrets over what you’ve
used in the past, too. When it
comes to music, I was an initially
dubious but eventually quite
whole-hearted convert to MP3 and
AAC. Thank God, I never dabbled
in the really crazy stuff like
Windows Media Audio or Ogg
Vorbis. I kept buying CDs way past
it being a remotely cool or non-
dad-like thing to do and would rip
them at the very highest quality
that AAC or MP3 could go. The
reasoning being that I would listento the better
sounding CD at home
and pack tens of
thousands of tunes into my
iPod and, subsequently,
smartphone to listen to on the go.
Of course, needless to say I didn’t
listen to the CDs. I just ripped them,
put them on a shelf and never
touched them again. Portable, lossy
music formats such as MP3 are just
so damn convenient, because you
can summon up any tune you want,
instantly. As the amount of storage
available on phones grew and grew,
I was happier and happier. In fact
for many years, my only reason for
upgrading my blower was to gain
more storage space – and that’s an
expensive business if you’re an
iPhone user.concert/
loud earbuds-
style abuse I have put my ears
through. But even I can discern a
quality difference immediately.
And the problem is, once you’ve
heard that difference it is ever so
hard to go back. I now have
thousands upon thousands of CD
rips that I just can’t bear to listen to.
Sure, practically everything is on
streaming services but not
absolutely everything – especially if
you like the kind of cutting-edge
weird shit that I enjoy listening to
and which you’re probably too
square to have heard of.
The only thing I can compare it
to is looking back on photos taken
during the period where I habitually
used vintage camera filters to cover
up the shortcomings of phone
cameras of that time. There are
hundreds of photos of me in cool
places looking young and awesome,
but they’re all seemingly taken in
1973 rather than the early 2000s,
with grain aplenty, weird colour
saturations, and a sickly brown tint.
So anyway, much as I find it
annoying to have the Chord Mojo 2
attached to my phone, in a spider’s
nest of digital and analogue wires, I
am loath to go back to listening to
music via wireless buds. Once you
know things can sound – or look, or
perform – better, it’s damn hard to
go back to what you had before.“I now have thousands
upon thousands of CD
rips that I just can’t
bear to listen to”
Then one day I got a Tidal Hi-Fi
subscription and my world fell
apart. Some claim that most people
can’t actually tell the difference
between lossy formats such as MP3
and the higher bitrate, more-or-less
CD quality formats used by Tidal,
Qobuz, Amazon HD, Apple Music et
al. Well I’m calling bullshit on that
theory. You’d have to be seriously
deaf not to notice the improvement.
My hearing is clearly not great after
the years of rave/club/rockC
Duncan Bell
has tech regrets
A Christmas present reinvigorates
his love of digital music – at a cost