Chord Electronics Mojo DAC/Headphone Amplifier Review
When I first heard about the Chord Mojo the thing that immediately popped into my head was Dr. Evil’s voice. “I’ve got your mmmoooojooooo!”. Much like Austin’s “mmmoooojooooo”, the Mojo by Chord Electronics is a well revered item.
Have a search on Google right now for “best portable DAC” and you’re bound to find dozens of reviews and comparisons which all list the Mojo as the best portable DAC for the price. Now, at $600 it still isn’t cheap for an item which has roughly the same dimensions as a pack of playing cards, but in terms of sound quality alone the next step up will cost you 3-4 times as much.
So what does $600 get you? Let me compare it to what I consider to be an astounding value for money setup, the Fiio E18 and E12A setup.
Specs:
- Headphones impedance: 4 Ohm – 800 Ohm
- Output Impedance: 0.075 Ohm
- Dynamic range: 125dB
- THD @ 3V: 0.00017%
- Charge time: 4 hours
- Battery life: Up to 10 hours
- File resolution: 32kHZ – 768kHz, DSD256
- Inputs: Fully digital; micro-USB, 3.5mm Coaxial, Optical
Design:
The first thing you’ll notice about the Chord Mojo is that it has a really quirky, very unconventional design. Admittedly it doesn’t look quite as weird in person as it does in pictures, but it still looks strange nonetheless. Chord certainly does do things differently, both on the tech front as well as the device design; but different doesn’t mean better.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not a fan of the design. It doesn’t look like a $600 device, and I much prefer the subtler and more refined design of Fiio’s amps and DACs. The different coloured lights that indicate the sampling rate of the audio file being fed to the chord Mojo is kind of cool, but the same idea is being used to indicate the volume level. This (to me at least) is completely unintuitive as there is no way of simply looking at the device and knowing at which volume level it has been set at, unless you know off by heart what each colour represents. Also, the “ball” buttons can spin in all directions, but this serves absolutely no purpose….which makes it seem a bit “cheap”.
Connecting:
Hooking the Chord Mojo up to your phone (or other Android or iOS based DAP) is pretty simple. In the case of Android you’ll need an OTG cable, and for iOS you’d need the Camera Connection Kit cable. Oddly enough, I tried to use the small micro-to-micro USB cable that came with my E18, but this didn’t work. My best guess is that it actually isn’t an OTG cable, and perhaps the OTG part happens inside of the E18 rather. So instead I had to use a normal OTG cable and full sized USB-to-micro cable to get the Mojo connected to my LG G3. Other connections include a 3.5mm COAX, and optical port.
Once it was connected to the G3 (running official Android 6.0) I started listening to various 96kHz and 192kHz files, but for some reason every now and again, when selecting a different track, the phone would reboot. This never happened with the same track(s), and I also couldn’t pin it down to a certain amount of time. However, I did get the Galaxy S7 over the weekend and I’m happy to report that it didn’t suffer from the same reboot issue. So I’m not sure what the issue was with the G3.
Sound:
When the phone wasn’t doing its rebooting business, I really enjoyed the Mojo’s sound. This is where it made sense that the device is quite pricy. It offered an exceptionally well refined sound, ever so slightly warm, but with no single frequency range ever overshadowing another. Instruments sounded very well spaced-out and you could hear tons and tons of subtle details. I guess the best way to describe it would be that it has a fantastically realistic presentation and really makes you enjoy music as a presentation, rather than just a rhythm. Everything just sounds right.
So is there a world of difference when compared to my E18+E12A setup? No. Well, not as much as the marketing hype will have you believe. Simply put, unless you can listen to both at the same time to compare the sound you probably wouldn’t notice a change.
However, when you do listen to them both, you definitely can hear a difference, it’s just not a world-altering change as you might expect. There is not a single bit of detail in the music that I heard on the Mojo but couldn’t hear on the E18+E12A setup, but rather that a large number of those details sounded ever so slightly different, more natural and realistic, with the Mojo. But the fact remains that the Mojo absolutely does present the music in a better way.
Mojo Video Review by Koolpep
Will it improve my audio experience?
The way I always try to explain it to others is to think of your entire audio setup in much the same way as a car. The audio file is the fuel, the DAC is the engine, the AMP is the gearbox, and finally the headphones are the tyres.
Keep in mind this is simply to illustrate the chain of events taking place in an audio setup, and as such is a rather crude analogy (as in a car neither the fuel, nor the engine or the gearbox have any direct effect on the performance potential of the tyres, for example). But the quality and performance of each part has a direct influence on the system as a whole. So yes, the Mojo will offer an improvement to pretty much any setup, but if the other parts of the equation are sub-par, you’re not going to reach the Mojo’s true potential.
What’s in the box?
- MOJO
- USB cable
Pros&Cons:
Pros
- Tons of power
- Exceptionally compact
- Fantastic sound quality
- Build materials
- Dual headphone ports
- Connection options
Cons
- Rather pricy
- Battery life could be better
- Unintuitive indication for controls
- Becomes much warmer than what seems necessary
Purely based on sound quality alone, I really want to give the Mojo a perfect 10. However, I also know that I haven’t tested a ton of equipment, and that there are better units out there (the Chord Hugo, for example). But it genuinely does sound that good; good enough for me to forgive the strange design and unintuitive UI (which says a lot, since I’m a total UI perfectionist).
Is it worth buying?
This is a very tough call to make. I genuinely do like the Mojo and love the way it handles audio. It’s incredibly compact and portable, and probably the closest thing you’re going to get to desktop performance (even though it’ll outclass the vast majority of desktop solutions out there too). But I think for now I’m going to hold out on buying it, and instead see what Fiio produces with their upcoming Q5 Amp/DAC. But if the Q5 can’t deliver, I will almost certainly opt for the Mojo.
Many thanks to Samma3a for letting me borrow the Mojo and review it over the last week or so; I have thoroughly enjoyed the device.
