Wow, I just watched Rob Watts (some people are just born with the right name) who designed the M Scaler, responding to Amir’s / Audiosciencereview (ASR) review’s trashing of the M Scalar! Rob goes into incredible depth that clearly shows that The ASR measurements don’t have any context to them.
However, there is one measurement for which Rob’s response makes me less interested in adding the M Scalar. The ASR site and another both measured very poor jitter performance. Rob said jitter of the M Scalar IS high, and it is due to the thing that had to be used to get the upsampling so high.
But here is the part that bugged me: Rob says that Chord DACs are resistant to jitter so it doesn’t matter that the M Scaler has poor jitter performance. I don’t doubt that is true. But he also said “I can’t speak for other DACs” and he said he designed the M Scalar to be used with Chord DACs. He said he doesn’t think it’s really supposed to be used with non-Chord DACs.
So I have a PhoenixUSB to remove jitter (and things sound awesome with it), and this would feed the M Scalar, only to add a high amount of jitter back in (but getting the benefit of upsampling). It feels like a trade off, and Rob even said it’s not meant for use in my particular case…
I think I’m less interested in the M Scalar now…. I’m certain it works wonders with Chord DACs though….