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QBD76 the World's Most
Technically Advanced DAC
Next generation DAC resolves more musical information than any
DAC using conventional
chips and includes USB and Bluetooth inputs.
Chord Electronics has once again produced the world's most
technically advanced DAC. Building on the huge success of the award winning DAC64, the
QBD76 now takes D/A conversion to a new level of performance not
available in any other product. In addition USB and digital Bluetooth
inputs allow you to enjoy very high quality audio playback from
anywhere your music happens to be stored.
Instead of simply using the best off the shelf DAC chips, Chord
actually designed their own using the newest Xilinx field
programmable gate arrays. This state-of-the-art development platform
provides Chord engineers with a staggering 1,250,000 logic gates
with which to design their DAC.
This level of capability was undreamt of only a few years ago.
By comparison the best DAC chips available today use only 30,000
logic gates. Thus, with over 40 times the development power, Chord
engineers were able to control every aspect of their DAC’s design
and performance. As a result, the QBD76 is capable of resolving 40dB
more data than DACs using the best off the shelf chips.
This means the QBD76 can resolve more musical information than
any DAC using even the best chips can. This
remarkable innovation takes the QBD76 very near the theoretical
limit for CD audio, and once again Chord emerges with technology
literally years ahead of the competition.
 "
This is the very best DAC I've heard to date...
it's obvious that Chord's new QBD76 is in a gang of one.
Dramatically musical yet devastatingly revealing sound makes this
unique product the definitive digital to analogue converter right
now." - Hi-Fi World, Sept. 2008
"Remember, although the DAC64 was Stereophile's 2007 Product of
the Year, and awarded A+ Recommended Component in 2007, it is
actually eight year old technology! Imagine the improvements in
digital technology over the past eight years. Better yet, don't
imagine, go hear one today!
With it’s new design and updated WTA algorithm, the QBD76
achieves a signal to noise ratio greater than 120 dB, a dynamic
range of 122dB, and, remarkably, less than 3pS clock jitter cycle to
cycle! The QBD76 has astounding resolving power and is better able
to reconstruct transient edges than the DAC64. This results in
substantial improvements in: timing, imaging, soundstage depth,
pitch reproduction and bass definition.
Usability has been improved with the addition of a display and
control via a microcontroller circuit. Input selection, phase and
RAM buffer settings can all be changed using three buttons on the
top panel. Configuration is clearly visible via the magnified
display. There are two coax, two AES, two optical, one USB and
one Bluetooth A2DP input.
  
World's first high quality Bluetooth DAC
The most noteworthy advance may be the Bluetooth audio input.
Imagine your cell phone, PC or PDA transformed into a CD quality
music player connected wirelessly to your stereo or home theater!
Now you can because the QDB76 is the world's first DAC to use the superior digital
output from Bluetooth.
Modern phones, personal digital assistants and personal
computers now have the ability to transmit high quality audio using
the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile or A2DP for short.
Chord engineers worked with the originators of Bluetooth in Finland
to design a custom Bluetooth receiver which is able to extract and
decrypt the much higher quality digital audio output from the
Bluetooth A2DP signal.
By using this digital signal the QBD76 can reproduce music
transmitted wirelessly at literally CD quality. Chord's DAC is the
world's first to utilize this digital signal. Therefore the QBD76
will sound substantially better than virtually all other devices
which can only access the analog audio output of Bluetooth.
With true ground breaking sonic performance and features the
QBD76 defines the future of high quality digital music playback. US retail price
is $6,295. The QBD76 is in stock at Bluebird now in both silver and black
finishes.
Technical Background
The QBD76, from digital input to the DAC outputs, was designed
using the latest generation of field programmable gate array
devices, (FPGA), now with 1.25 million gates. The FPGA handles the
switching of the SPDIF inputs, all digital SPDIF decoding, digital
PLL, RAM buffer controller, WTA filtering, and the 5th generation
Pulse Array DAC. All of these functional blocks are designed at the
gate level, for maximum performance.
The QBD76 features state of the art improvements to the Pulse
Array DAC, in particular the noise shaper architecture. Considerable
work was done to improve this aspect of Pulse Array with the
specific aim of reducing noise. Amongst other improvements the 5th
generation Pulse Array now has 8th order noise shaping, (the highest
order of noise shaping of any known DAC), and 2608 times
oversampling and digital filtering. A new digital PLL was developed
using a highly accurate 115MHz clock. Data related jitter is
completely removed from the source, and all that remains is random
master clock jitter of less than 3pS cycle to cycle.
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