Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Metal Mastermind Podcast. I am your host, Ken Cadellis. And today we have a very special guest from Cordy Electronics, His name is Tom Vaughn. Tom, why don't you say hello? Hi, Ken, how you doing? I'm good. It's really, really cool to have cordy electronics here today. I have so many questions when it comes to headphones and amplifiers and all this kind of stuff in the match between all
this. And it actually at a really interesting time because as you guys know on Metal Mastermind here I am a professor of audio engineering and audio technology is such a passion of mine. And actually this week I was just going over electromagnetism and microphone technology and how all of this stuff plays into the quality of sound that we have. And Cordy Electronics specializes in headphone amps and also speaker amp fire technology, which I thought would be a very interesting
conversation to have here. So, Tom, why don't you just give a little back story about what Cord Electronics does and maybe your own personal experience getting into it? Absolutely. Sounds sounds good. So here at Cord Electronics, we were founded in 1989 by John Franks, the owner of the company and still our analog designer in obviously small company classic in the garage kind of starting out. So the first generation of power amplifiers built by us were all built in John's garage.
And there are a few workers here still to this day that remember working in that garage and and winding Transformers and all this. Sort of. Wow, amazing. Yeah, John actually comes from an aviation background. He used to work for Marconi, who's a military manufacturing plant just up the road from us here designing power supplies and he specialized in switch mode power supply designs and thought, well, you know what industry really is lacking in efficiency.
This is in 1989 was the audio industry and he keen interest in in listening to audio equipment and all that sort of stuff. So he decided to build an amplifier and that amplifier that he then got working and tested and and was all well and good. He took to the BBC and he went to the BBC and said just try this amplifier through a friend who lived locally who also happened to design speakers for the BBC. He said you need to take this to
the BBC. So he took the power amplifier along to the BBC and to this day it's the fastest authorised piece of technology the BBC have allowed because they were so blown away with the quality they went, oh, this is amazing. So instead of completely, completely gutting one of the studios up in London, they decided to just replace the power amplifiers and it was like night and day in that studio. So that's that's how we started out providing power amplifiers
for the professional industry. Now again, back in the late 80s, early 90's, the BBC dictated essentially what the studios were to have installed as a main system. So places across the world from there on with the BBC started outgoing. OK, so how do we upgrade our studios? And then it went to Abbey Road, it went to Ayr, it went to British Grove, excuse me, Metropolis, which are the biggest studios now in London.
And then from there it went international because what Abbey Road had Skywalker Sound needed over in LA, sorry, over in San Francisco. So Skywalker Sound took it on. Then all of a sudden Sony took it on and it just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. So us as a business, that's how we were, that's how we started out. We were always a supplier of professional amplifiers and installations within recording studios, mastering studios, all that sort of stuff. So that's, that was how we
started out as a company. From there we looked and went, Oh no, all of the studios have got power amplifiers, what do we do now? So we've sort of saturated the market a little bit with power amplifiers and went, well, there's a hi-fi industry over there. So should we go and see if we can make some money over there as well, of which we have been doing ever since. Now my job here at Cord Electronics is a sort of like a
two-part role. And I've, I mean, I've been working here since I was 15, making cables, counting bits. Wow. Yeah, little bits from here and there during during the school holidays. It was like, OK, Tom, are you free? I'm like, yeah, I'll come and work. I mean, of course. So yeah, it was, I mean, they've, they've treated me so, so fantastically well. But I also did a sound engineering degree, so specializing in mastering and audio electronics were my 2 sort of roots within. Fascinating.
So I mean like art has really been like a a big family to you for. Oh yeah, yes, very much. Of your life. Very. Much so that is so cool. And yeah, you know, it's interesting because I came in to cord understanding it as a hi-fi brand, not necessarily in the professional market, but its roots really were in the professional.
So it shows how much influence you guys have had in other markets to the point where, you know, newcomers think it's it it, it started in Hi-fi. So that's really fascinating. Exactly that I mean so I mean to this to this day. So 1/2 of my drugs, so it's because because we're again, we're already a small company, so quite a lot of us have got
multiple different roles. 1/2 of my job is here in the office in the pump house manufacturing and building and repairing some of the older power amplifiers and new power amplifiers for current customers helping. I also help John Franks design various other bits and bobs around. But it's, but it's pretty much specifically just John. He sort of goes, yeah, this is good, this works.
And then I sort of tweak it a little bit maybe for the professional market and then of which leads me into the second-half of my job, which is actually looking after our professional clients around the world. You might call it a sales role, but it's more like Technical Support. I just go along and say, try this and they listen to it and go, I want one. I'm like, hey. Well, yeah, certainly I could see the appeal and for, for contacts for anybody here.
Tom and I, we met at Mexico in the Soundcheck Expo and the Pan American Audio Educators Conference, ex, you know, exhibit where we were basically just in passing. I was I was already an artist with Odyssey and you guys are very close friends with Odyssey. You. I was actually told that you and Chris are are quite good friends. We certainly are, indeed.
And that's, and that I feel like it's just such a beautiful thing to see manufacturers, you know, sort of partnering up in this way to provide just a quality solution for anybody who's looking to do professional audio. And all of our discussions during that time were fascinating to me. And I'm always curious to know more about this kind of stuff as a, as a very big nerd myself.
And I've been on, I guess you could say a bit of a quest for, of course, finding what's the best solution for my studio. And you know, I had actually a very a simple problem here that needed some fixing, which is that I bought the wrong headphone app. And for anybody who is working with or has tried different types of headphone brands and different types of impedances for headphones, you'll also have discovered that headphone amps do matter and how they drive the
headphone. So I want to just start off here with this conversation about the importance of headphone selection for headphone amps. And you know, maybe can you share some of your thoughts on your experience with that, Tom?
Of course, absolutely. Yeah. So obviously headphones, I mean, again operating in sort of the headphi industry and then looking at it from the professional industry as well, different impedances have a huge impact on the electronics and how the electronics goes about driving those particular designs.
So these ones, these orders, the headphones that we are both using, they're magnetic planer, which is a very thin foil with a trace on it, which is very, very different to your standard headphone design, which is your classic dynamic driver, bit like a speaker, but on a much, much smaller scale. You know, magnetic coil and then, sorry, a coil of wire in a
magnetic field. And then you change the coil and then change the current in the coil in it and it drives the headphone again, very, very different. But saying that they have very different impedances across the board. It depends on which sort of headphone manufacturer you choose. Depends on kind of the, the sound quality of it and also how easy or how difficult it is to drive.
Some say the harder the headphone to drive, the better the sound quality, but that's not necessarily true because my some of my favorite headphones are actually really easy to drive. Specifically not I think it might be even this set that I'm wearing at the moment. This is work set. I have another one at home. So, but we have, you know, various, various other bits and bobs. So the higher the impedance, the hard generally tends to be, sorry, the easier to drive ish.
It's sort of like a fine balance to be honest with you, but the lower the impedance, the harder it is. Like if you start dropping 20 ohms, 15 ohms, 10 ohms, all of a sudden you're starting to look into speaker realm and you need a whole bunch more current, a whole bunch more power available to be actually to drive those cones in their entirety. Interesting because it's like it's sort of like a seesaw,
right? Yeah. So you know, and for for for those of you who are not quite familiar with electronic terms, impedance is resistance, right. So if you were to picture it like like a highway, think of it like a toll booth right in the middle of the highway. So exactly it's, it's very, it's very similar in that way. So if you have a low impedance, more more current is really kind of desirable so that you can have all that flow reach your headphones and drive them properly versus the opposite,
right? Which would take, you know, maybe only a little bit of power in order to really drive it, which is so fascinating to me because this balance, you know, it's, it's a proportional balance. You know, anybody who studies Ohm's law has this sort of understanding, but you know, going into now a headphone amp technology and how that actually powers this.
It's it's so interesting because I remember we were talking about this and how you mentioned that the the the cord headphone amp can actually change according to what it's plugged into. Is, is this. Correct. So, so essentially it doesn't sort of send a signal to the headphones and engage the impedance. There are bits of technology that do that.
But again, so this this actually harks to a lot of our designs specifically is if you build them right the first time from the ground up, you don't need to design compromises into the final design. So, so bear with me for a second because because it does get, I'll try to keep it as simple as possible. But like our digital to analogue converters, I'm sure we'll touch on this a little bit later on as
well. With regards to the FPGA versus the standard DAC chip, our power amplifier designs, including our digital to analogue converter driving circuits as it were, they don't send a signal to be able to read the impedance. Now there are other manufacturers that do that. And by doing that, what they do is then change the output impedance according to what the headphones read at. Now output impedance is is. This is now getting really difficult with regards to power amplifier designs.
Output impedance is is it is directly tied to damping factor, which is how well an amplifier can actually control a speaker cone across the frequency band. Now the lower the output impedance, technically the better the power amplifier
design. This gives us the ability to essentially control any cone at all across the board, no matter whether it's a speaker cone coming down at one ohm, or whether it's a speaker cone or a transmission line, or whether it's a set headphones coming in at 600 ohms. The lower the output means the more ability to control a wider band of overall driver impedances.
Now what other manufacturers do is they try to read what the headphones are and then change, potentially change the op amp, change the output impedance accordingly because they've got different gain settings. Now that's a that's a convenient way of doing things, but they are limited to what that op amp or what that amplifier design circuitry can do. Then swap the gain out and go, OK, well, maybe we need this gain for this level of impedance for this headphone.
Great idea. Not to mention that like every single piece of electronic is affecting the signal in some way, shape or form. Exactly that, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, a spot on, of course. But by doing that, what they're doing is they've gone OK. So it's this, how can we build a compromise to counter the fact that we have a circuit that can't necessarily drive the headphones properly? So they've gone OK, We're going to up the game for this side
kind of headphone. We're going to up the game for this kind of headphone, whereas what we do here at Cord Electronics is because we design the amplifier from the ground up, we don't use other people's manufacturing designs or concepts or anything like that. We have a ridiculously low output impedance to be able to control any impedance of headphone or speaker or anything like that across the board
without any hesitation. So it's literally a case of just plugging it in and the amp will go, OK, yeah, cool, this is it. And just turn the volume up. If it's harder to drive, just keep on going. It basically it's like because you guys have so much current that's going through that port that basically your volume is the impedance. Essentially, yes, yeah. So I mean we, we, we, we control the the actual small signal going into the power amplifier.
But yes, fundamentally that is that is what we're doing we're. That's amazing. Yeah, it's, it's just a more simpler, even I would say even more pure approach to, to just giving as much power as possible and then gauging it yourself, what feels right in your headphones. That makes a lot of sense to me because like, how could you build, you know, one for all? I mean, it's, it's really just going to have to be let's just open the floodgates and you become the dam essentially to control.
That that's exactly it. It's spot on. So certainly with, you know, with regards to Alto, I have one here. So the headphone amp that we were just talking about this one, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a power amplifier as well. It, you know, it can do 50 watts into four ohms. It's, it's unbelievably powerful. So we've had to attenuate the headphone output to about half the amount of power that the
actual amplifier can offer. But by actually having that much power available, it can drive any headphone on the market with regards to any level of impedance, but also have an unbelievable amount of headroom available as well. So it's kind of nice it's not working very hard when you've got headphones plugged in and that's what gives it the ability to give you the most accurate and and unbelievably high
controlled. That's not English, but that kind of, you know what I'm trying to say, like the timing is everything so. You know, one, one quality that I certainly felt with cord electronics is it's an effortlessness to reproduce the electrical signal. So it, it just sounded more natural to me, which I think is very hard to replicate. So kudos to you guys. I mean, you guys have been doing it already for a long time.
But man, it's definitely always amazing to hear 'cause you know, I've been, I've been in mastering rooms, I've been in, you know, recording studios and broadcasts and live sound and all these different applications of audio and this kind of tech with headphones always intrigued me.
And, and, and also of course with speaker amplifiers as well, it's just a fascinating part of the side of audio of, you know, sound reproduction that I think gets a little bit understated sometimes or in other, in other markets when it comes to audiophile. Sometimes I believe it's even overemphasized in some ways that some product manufacturers might even blow smoke in in their clients. Yeah, you know, so. So to speak.
Of course. Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. It's it's one of those it's it's being the guy that builds the amplifiers, services the amplifiers, helps John develop the amplifiers, all this sort of stuff. And and being so engrossed in the amplifier technology, I know quite a lot of various bits of what's going on now. Lots, so many people in the not just the professional industry, but the hifi industry, the audio industry, full stop. They see a power amplifier go,
it's a power amplifier. What do you want it to do? So they go, you want me to spend how much on a power amplifier? I can get one for a couple of 100 bucks down the road, which is 4 times the amount of power. And it's the way that that power is delivered so accurately and with with a ridiculously high damping factor. So that again, I come back to that, that ability to control the be it headphones or a speaker driver timing is everything with our ears.
That's, you know, that's how we can tell anything. It's how we tell 3D orientation with regards to sound. It's it's the micro nanoseconds between our two ears and the way that our brain interprets it is, is all down to that accuracy. And that's what we strive for here at Chord electronics is just speed. I. Have a question, so of course damping factor because I've I've I've heard the term before but could you equate damping factor
to like the brakes in a vehicle? Yes, I'm just trying, yes, essentially if, if you really want to look at it, it's a bit more like suspension to be honest with you, because it's, yeah, it's, it's how quickly a damping factor can be in multiple things. There's there's damping factor in electrical terms, there's damping factor in a physical term with regards to speaker currents, for example, the rubber, the tension that holds the, the, the cone in place has
a damping factor it has. And essentially it results in the ability to either stop and start the cone or give way to the cone stopping and starting. So it's the same as sort of like suspension, whether you have really hard suspension like a BMW or whether you have really soft suspension in like a Bentley or something like that. You know, you're driving over potholes and it just feels like you're going, you let this,
whereas in a, in a BMW. But that speed that that is actually for a, for a speaker cone will deliver you more accurate timing between the two speaker cones and and our ears. So actually the lower the damping factor, the more wishy washy it becomes, the more Bentley and the more comfortable more loose. Yeah, the, the more artificial bloom in the low end the speaker's going to represent and it's going to feel like it's, it's honestly, it's a thing. People love people. Absolutely.
So valve amplifiers, for example, I have a lot of respect for them. Glowing light bulbs look pretty, feel great, sound wonderful for probably about half an hour. It feels like you're sitting, sitting in a chair with a whiskey and a cigar and you're just, you know, big high backed chair. And it's all like, Oh yeah, this is this is lovely. But it's only for our for us as humans, as a perception, a maximum of sort of half an hour of listening 45 minutes before the ears go, you know what?
Something ain't quite right though. It's like having an audio cuddle, but you can only have it for so long. Whereas the higher the accurate transient response of a power amplifier to be able to then control a speaker cone, the more natural it becomes listening. Now it might be harder to experience. It might be like, oh, it's harsh, or it's all, there's too much information, all this sort of stuff.
Well, actually that's not true. What you're hearing is what is meant to be happening within the music. And by giving you all of that timing information, it gives you a better 3D perspective of the depth of field, not just your stereo field, but the depth of field. And a strange one, I know. And it sounds a bit hi-fi, to be
honest with you. But like how tall the sound can get and how all of a sudden you're looking at listening to an orchestra, for example, and you can pick out the second desk of the second violins. You can pick out the third trumpet or trombone coming from over here rather than just it sort of sounding like a big orchestra. And then that leads to longevity of listening experience.
So you can sit down for an hour and a half, you can sit down for two hours listening to this kind of stuff and you don't get fatigue because it's more natural rather than. Fascinating. That that wishy washy effect. I mean, it, it, it makes a a ton of sense with, with transient information, that's where most of the information that we recognize with instruments, placement, spatiality, it all exists in the transient. That's like our audio info bubble, right? It's at the head.
All that, you know, sustain and all that good stuff, which, you know, I, I, it's not a problem for speakers to reproduce that information. But for, for, for the transient, yeah, that's, it's all about timing and speed, right. So those that are a lot more LAX and have a more quote, UN quote, romantic feeling, they are, yeah. They're not designed for critical listening. They're designed for easy listening, which is a very
different experience. It's so, you know, knowledge of, of choosing your speakers really comes down to cause I've, it's always, it's always about preference in many ways. But then there are some cases where it's specifically about, you know, clinical detail that depending what you're do using the speaker for, it does matter, which is where we start to separate the pro market from the hi-fi market in some ways.
So and so that's fascinating. And I mean, behind all of that, I mean, you know, let's get into some of the digital to audio conversion that you guys are doing because this was something new to me too that I didn't understand before we started actually speaking on this subject. And what DAC chips are doing differently than what you've mentioned, which is an FPGA? What? Well, let's just start there. What is an FPGA First off? And then what is a DAC chip and how do they different?
OK. So yeah, diving down into the digital route with regards to called electronics and the and the way that we do things. So an FPGA is a field programmable gate array. It's essentially a electronic blank canvas. It's a processor that's got millions of transistors in it that are programmable rather than. So in a standard PC, when you look at a processor, it's a, it's a million billions of of transistors operating at billions of times a second.
But it's, it's only will do what it's told to do, input in and input out. Whereas a, an FPGA, it's essentially a processor, but you program those transistors to sit in a certain way and then that's it. They're set. You can reprogram them if you wanted to, but rather than information in information out, they sort of go information in and it's like, what do I need to do with this? Oh, I know what I need to do with this. Then process it. So it's like a static chip rather than a dynamic.
Exactly that, yeah. So that that's what an FBGA does. Now, an FBGA can be used for anything at all. There's a really pretty high demand for them at the moment in the world, shall we say, for certain military applications over in Europe, for example. So there's, there's a pretty high demand for Fpgas for that reason, you know, flying helicopters, you can drive a crane, you can operate a remote satellite with it or something,
anything, literally anything. And what we've done is we've dedicated all of that power for the sole purpose of converting digital music to analogue music just for our own experience. So that is, that's an FPGA, Zach. We are one of, I would say two companies, maybe three, that use an FPGA for the sole purpose of actually converting digital
through to analogue signals. Now lots of other manufacturers declare themselves as all, we're an FPGA DAC and it's sort of like, are you though, or are you just using the FPGA as a control point, which is another. It's a very sort of, it's a keyword. It's a hot word that people were starting to clock onto and go, Oh yeah, we're an FPGA DAC company. I'm like, are you though?
So it's, it could be a bit, you know, a bit risky out there, but so, so anyway, so we, we do use it for the digital to analogue filtering and processing and all this sort of stuff. Whereas every other manufacturer in the world, they are subject to the big guns and their designs where they go. I've designed a DAC chip, say for example, Texas Instruments. I'm not going to, I'm, I'm not afraid of naming names because it's one of the biggest manufacturers in the world of
electronic components. Texas Instruments will turn around and say, I've designed a DAC chip and it's amazing by the way. And these are the statistics and you go, OK, that's pretty good, but it's not as good as one of
ours. But the other manufacturers will go, well, this is the best in the world that we can buy because that's, that's it. That's so every high end manufacturer will buy one of these DAC chips And the only way to improve or change the sound quality is to change the electronics around it. But the fundamental part of it, the actual digital to analogue conversion is still limited across all other manufacturers to this one design, which this
one manufacturer has come up with, whereas we've gone down the other route and gone. That's not what we want. We don't want to use these guys because we know how to do it better. The the the actual digital to analogue converter. Our our digital programmer here, Robert Watts, There's loads and loads of information out about how he does his designs and and all this sort of stuff.
You can find it online that dives into the real technical insurance and outs because we have No Fear about explaining how we do things, why we do things and the way that we do things. Rob's like this is it. The only thing that is protected is the code. So that's, you know, it's 256 bit encoded. It's good luck to whoever wants to try and get into that. So, yeah, so that's, so that's every other manufacturer is subject to these standard DAC chips.
Now they are designed to a price point, which is why they are limited. Their timing is OK, their distortion is pretty good, but still OK. And other bits and bobs that are filtering is just OK. There's nothing really that stands out about those fun, those, those designs which they then produce mass produce for, for the market. Whereas what we do again coming down to the FPGA thing, because we have absolute control over
everything. We have better timing, we have better distortion, we have better accuracy when it comes to noise floor modulation is a is a huge thing that we are the only manufacturer that is eliminated noise floor modulation. So just to dive into that really quickly, because that's that's actually a pretty fundamental part about what makes. Very curious, what is? What is noise much like?
So noise floor modulation. So if we if we were in a room talking together and or somebody, or we were sitting down listening to somebody playing the guitar, or we were listening to classical music and orchestra, a small, small 10 piece band or anything like that, the noise floor stays where it is. OK, So we can have a conversation. The noise floor does this and it goes, I'm the noise floor and I'm flat, I'm down here.
Noise floor ventilation. When it comes to digital, to analogue conversion, what happens when you can start converting the digital signal into the analogue one? The noise floor starts pumping like this. For every digital signal, every pulse, the noise floor starts pumping like this. And like every sample. You get pretty much yes. So for us as human beings, we can't, we, you can't go, Oh, I can hear the noise floor modulation. It's, it's bumping, it's, it's
moving up and down. But what we suffer from when listening to noise floor modulation, when the noise floor is pumping up and down like this is listening fatigue. And it happens quickly. You'd be surprised at how not OK it is to listen to music through a really bad DAC because you can only, you'll only be able to listen to it sort of like 1520 minutes and go, OK, this sounds and all of a sudden your ears will go, everything will start becoming really flat.
Everything will start coming like it's really shallow. The noise, the stereo field starts coming in and you just sort of, you don't realise, but it's a subconscious thing to do with noise form modulation. And this is what happens. Whereas if you eliminate that noise form modulation, so you move it from doing this to down here, it becomes natural. And for us as human beings, all of a sudden we're listening to
music. So that removes that problem psycho acoustically out of the equation entirely. And that's a proven thing. That's that's that's something which is. So let me ask you a question about this, because this is, this is a different kind of noise that I that, that you're talking about. As far as what I'm perceiving here.
It's, it's the noise that rides the wave rather than let's say ground home that we're talking about here, right, 'cause noise in that sense, that's, that's from your power supply, it's coming from the wall, right? It's circulating the entire building versus what is actually in the voltage of the signal. Yes, yes. Interesting. Spot on, spot on. Yeah.
So it's not your standard. So, so, so for example, if we're in a loud room, I'm not talking about the noise floor, that would then just the noise floor's gone up. But that noise floor, it also that noise floor, it's so it's an electrical noise floor essentially. It's the the one that I'm talking about, not a noise floor. But also you've got to remember that noise floor, even if it is loud, it won't start unnaturally
doing this. It's loud and then it's quiet, and then it's loud, and then it might go quiet again. So us as human beings overall, we're not used to the whole pumping situation, the whole noise floor modulation experience. It's so unnatural for us. And it's a pretty fundamental flaw in pretty much all designs of Dax. That's amazing. Holy crap. So the FPGA, I'm, I'm assuming because is it, is it because it's just it's a simpler chip.
It it's, it's got it's. It's it's about 5000 times more powerful than a standard DAC chip. Wow. So, OK, so because there's actually an increase in power, you have more headroom and because there isn't more complicated integrated chip design work happening, it's literally it's like it's already got its instructions. So it just does the thing very quickly, very simply. That's that's, that's quite,
quite amazing. So I mean, that comes down as to why lots of people say like, oh, why don't you make these? So, so this product's mojo Mojo 2 is our, is our little, our portable one. People would ask, oh, it's battery bad. They think, oh, cool, it is battery powered, which means it doesn't set power from your phone or your laptop or whatever the case may be if you are
portable. But the FPGA requires so much power that if you plug this, if you plug your phone into it, I think it would probably drain it in about an hour tops if you were using it at the same time. So there's, you know, there's, there's a lot of power going on in this, which is why it is the size they are, the size they are. We could get them smaller the size they are because we're limited to battery technology got.
It so that's, does that mean that because of a lack of power, because I, I had this experience when I was listening to the Mojo versus the Hugo versus the Alto, I said, wow, well, I mean like it, it gets better definitely. And is it because of how much power you give the FPGA? It's, it's not just that it is actually the size of the FPGA as well.
So each FPGA is has its own memory cache, it has its own quantity of transistors within it that we can then program and of which requires more heat sinking as well. So the bigger the processor, the more heat sinking it requires, which is why we jump up in size. So from Mojo, which is our portable one, we jump to the huge go to that I'm actually using as my digital to analog converter to talk to you at the.
Moment you're spoiled. To be honest with you, you're incredibly high definition, so it's great, fascinating. Oh my God. So I mean like so everything that cord has been putting out now has been integrating this type of technology even in your your top tier like products as well. It's the same technology. Yeah, absolutely. Size. It's exactly that, exactly that. So with regards to the we do, we do have, we sort of have like 2 branches that we specialize in.
I mean, every company has an analog and a digital side. It just happens that we're the best in the world for the digital side and one of the best in the world for the analog side as well. So the digital side, we have Mojo 2, Hugo two. We jump up to Hugo TT 2, which is the the DAC that you tried out when we're at sound check, that's square one. And then we have our reference one. Dave, it's about this big. I don't can't can't display one at the moment, unfortunately.
And then we go sort of go down the analogue route side of things where we have our power amplifier designs. So that's where the Alto comes into it. So we have Alto, we have various various degrees of of power with regards to monoblocks or stereo units, 500 watts per channel, 750 watts per channel, thousand Watt monoblocks.
And then we jump up to the to the biggest power amplifiers we make, which are about two and a half 1000 watts per channel, but they require, they require a lot of fare, a lot of a lot of aluminium, shall we say so. Yeah, absolutely. Well now does does cord also offer like full on just converters and stuff like that for multi channel pro audio tracking and stuff like that? Not yet. So at the moment everything is everything is stereo.
Everything we do is stereo. So Rob's been working on various projects, all this sort of stuff. We operate a digital, we, we create or manufacture a what I like to call a digital to digital converter. So it's called the M scaler which takes the this FPGA technology that you find in here and uses it in the digital
realm. So we take a 44.1 kHz file 16 bit and it's a sounds a bit like up sampling, but it's not because it uses out what it is, but it uses our technology to interpret which is what digital to analog conversion is to interpret what the next set of samples should be. And it takes that 4444 one 16 bit and it converts it up to 705.6 kHz, 56 bits. So the dynamic range goes through the roof as well, as well as the sample rate, which of which any of our converters can cope with.
You can Chuck it into this one. It will go all the way up to 768 kHz. So super, super advanced technology. I can't remember where I was going that that train. Oh, that train of thought. So Rob's, Rob's, we have that product. We've had that product for a few years. Rob's now working on I another product. We kind of launched it last year in Munich, high end that also has an analogue to digital converter on as well. Now that's something which we've never really touched before.
But as we are exploring that route, it gives us the opportunity to then start thinking about, OK, so if we have a two in two out, maybe then we could do a four in, four out. And then maybe we can Daisy chain them up. And then all of a sudden you have a 16 in out and it's all like, oh, OK, well, this all starts making sense. We've explored down the route of with regards to studios and all this sort of stuff.
You know, from the from the historical background that that we have, I've got a lot of friends in the industry, a lot of high end studios that are using various different methods to transport their digital signals right back to the old days of AES through to Dante and Maddie and all this sort of stuff. So we're exploring down the Dante route at the moment as well, of which the learning curve for us because it's not something we've ever explored before, but it's it's going very well.
And we have a working prototype product that uses currently 2 channels of Dante. But saying that it's so easy to convert that into a multi channel 80 and eight out, for example. So yes, there's there's stuff on the books, there's stuff which we are working towards and the whole point, the whole part of being a manufacturer isn't just to keep on reproducing the same stuff, it's it's thinking about what the next step is and where the.
Technology yeah, that's fabulous because I I, you know, this is probably one of those things that is a surprise out of a company that I misunderstood, but what it really was about. And I think it's just such a really cool piece of technology to push this kind of tech, you know, tech forward that others haven't really quite caught on yet.
Because you know, this has been a question of mine for a while is like, you know, how can DAX improve beyond going into something like DSD, which I know you've actually talked about to me as there are some flaws in DSD and I think it has something to do with this noise floor modulation. Am I correct in? Assuming that, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it's a fascinating thing, DSD. It was originally designed as a
storage format. For studios to go, OK, cool, we're just going to convert this to DSD and we can store it away. Large file sizes, but what was perceived at the time as the the highest quality available. But it turns out it's there is there is some question marks over it again. Rob actually has a whole presentation, an hour long presentation about DSD, which is very interesting if you really want to dive into the depths of the, the technical side of
things. But but the biggest problem, I mean, obviously we as a manufacturer, we have to make products that are DSD compatible. All of our products are DSD 512 compatible. So you know, right up to ridiculous sample rates. But we as a manufacturer generally, I said we, I stand corrected me as a Thomas Vaughan, prefer PCM for some technical reasons, shall we say? It's certainly more practical. It's Oh yes, unbelievably more practical.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, imagine trying to record a session in DSD, like, no, that take wasn't any good and I can't edit it do it again. So it's it's great for a classical set, for example, or if you're recording an orchestra, which is like a live
recording. OK, there are there are applications for it, but there there are some bits like the the the bit depth is a is a big flaw and the very, very high frequency spike shall we say they can alias down into the audio spectrum can can be a bit of a problem when it comes to listening and converting digital to analogue signal.
So your standard DAC chip coming back to those other manufacturers, if you Chuck DSD through them, then there's a good chance that that DS, DS probably got something going on in the audio spectrum which it shouldn't be doing. So which is why we have various different filters and all of our products for listening to DSD. So it's, so is it fair to assume that Cord and yourself Tom believe that it's not necessarily the format of either PCM or DSD that's really the
issue? It's it's the the way that it's, it's being converted to that format that really lies in its problems, right? Fundamentally, yes. Interesting the. Design concept behind DSD is, is, is brilliant. It's certainly one way of of going. OK, so how can we get this at the best sample rate we possibly can? And it is an unbelievably high sample rate. You know DSD 64 is 2.8 megahertz, right? But it's a bit depth of one, but it's 2.8 megahertz.
So you got a lot of samples for one second, whereas obviously PCM coming in at 44.1, which is why there is a good argument for DSD, but there's also a good argument for having a decent deck if you listen to the SD. So now, so then my final question on this DSD topic, Do you think this FPGA technology is something that's missing from DSD or is it something that is a bigger tackle or big bigger, bigger obstacle to tack?
I think it's, it's not, so it's not just FBI mean it's a, it's a difficult one because obviously I'm going to say, you know that our FPGA DAX are going to be the best at converting DSD because of the way that the Rob has the filters available for DSD listening. But it's not just that, it's it's the any, any manufacturer could implement the filters that we use within our designs for listening to DSD. They're just pretty simple high frequency roll off filters.
Other manufacturers might do it. There might be some out there that I'm unaware of. So I confess, you know, I don't go through every single manufacturer and say this one hasn't got this, this one hasn't got this because we all make great gear and we wouldn't be where we are without other manufacturers making equivalently good gear. It's all about preference. So yes and no is the answer to your question with regards to is it an FPGA that makes a
difference to DSD conversion. It helps, but there are the people that could do the same thing if they knew what was going on within the conversion of the DSD. Got it. Wow. Well, you know, Tom, this has been such an enlightening conversation. I certainly learned more about headphones and headphone amp and speaker amp technology today, and I'm sure that whoever's listening on the Metal Mastermind podcast has learned the same.
You know, here at Metal Mastermind, we are all about education for the modern musician. So without further ado, this is at a point in our conversation where I just want to tell the audience here on Metal Mastermind you'll find resources for audio education, music education, music business. There's a lot of exciting things happening at Metal Mastermind, so stay tuned for all the things that are coming up, but do check out our
onlinecourses@metalmastermind.com. And again, Tom, thank you so much for your time today from Cordy Electronics. I would love to keep this conversation going, so maybe sometime in the future we can have you invited back to the show. I can talk a little bit more about this kind of stuff. I think it's fascinating. Of course, there's a fair amount we haven't touched on, so yes, let's return. You know 111 final question and you could either say yes or no, but do cables matter in an
audio? File you. You had some keywords there at the end of your sentence, so the answer is yes. So you know. That. Maybe, maybe that could be another subject for another day and. I would be again, happy to talk about that because that's that's something that's something which we as a couple of the thing. OK, so very, very quickly we're Am I allowed to swear? Yes, that's OK. We're in no bullshit company, so there's your answer. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thanks so much, Tom.
I really appreciate your time today. And without further ado, cheers everybody and we'll see you next time.