I will give Chord some credit for the idea of running the DAC super fast. I play music and occasionally record myself, and I can tell you that when you look at

I will give Chord some credit for the idea of running the DAC super fast. I play music and occasionally record myself, and I can tell you that when you look at the waveforms, there is definitely a component of the human ear that can distinguish time intervals faster than 1/(22 kHz) despite being unable to hear frequencies over about 15-20 kHz (eg very tight flams in drum parts are audible). DSD had this idea, and I am 100% on board with it. Despite being a gold standard because of how it's produced, lossless CD audio cuts off this "high-frequency" component. However, the actual analog parts of Chord's system around the fast DAC and the upscaling circuit seemed to be sort of suspect to me, from the handling of reference clocks to the nature of the output amplifiers. I'm glad ASR has confirmed those suspicions before I bought one. At some point, I started a project making a multibit DAC running at 1 Msps with the same kind of FPGA upscaling (although ADI's SHARC DSPs are amazing) but a much more conventional frontend and better handling of clocks, but I realized it was too complicated to do while also doing all the other things I was doing at the time (and way too complicated now). The idea is still on the shelf for later (although it's probably already obsolete as a concept - delta-sigma is really good).