(music)
Hello, this is Drew Baird from Moon Audio and I
thought I'd give a little tour of connections for the Chord Mojo.
This is a hot new product that has just come out from Chord right here,
and I've gotten a lot of emails and a lot of phone calls about
confusion on how to connect things up. Things have changed a little bit
between the Mojo and the Hugo. Some things aren't working now, and some things are a lot easier so
it just depends on what you're connecting to, but I thought I'd give you a little bit of insight.
The first thing is that the Chord Mojo does not have an Apple Authenticity Chip in it. So what
does that mean? Well, the Hugo didn't have one either, and essentially what that is is Apple's
way of getting their hands on two products and making them what's called MFI certified so that
they know that there are no connection issues between their products and other products. And
so this is a lengthy process to go through, the MFI certification. You've also got to pay royalty
fees, etc., and some companies aren't willing to go into this sort of expensive complication,
Chord being one of them, and I can't blame them. They don't want to have their DACs
essentially being taken to Apple and looked at and studied and examined and so forth. So the way
you would connect to these products is you have to use what's known as a Camera Connection Kit,
and this little white cable that we have connected here to our Black Dragon USB cable is an Apple CCK
kit. It essentially was developed for you to be able to transfer pictures and video from your
camera to your iPad, iPhone, etc. But in this case what it's using is essentially a handshake
product. It's essentially telling the Apple device, the iDevice, either iPhone or iPod,
etc. -- well not iPod, we'll get back to that in a minute -- but iTouch, iPad,
and iPhone to essentially let the product output digital audio to a legacy device
such as the Chord Mojo, and unfortunately this ends up becoming a two cable solution,
because you'll need one cable that's got a micro to USB-A that you connect into the female socket
of the CCK. You connect that to your iDevice. (If I can get it in there.) And then you're going to
connect it to the audio input on the Mojo. The power light button will change colors.
Essentially what that's doing is it's locking to a signal. It's telling you that it's locked to a
signal. So when this power light is not turned on when you connect it to something, essentially you
haven't locked onto it or you haven't given it a handshake process in order for it to pull digital
audio from it. With a Samsung device, it's a little bit different, this being a Samsung tablet.
What we've created are a series of OTG cables, and OTG cables stands for on-the-go. And essentially,
these are wired slightly different than the normal USB cable that you're going to buy in the store,
and what it does is essentially the same thing as this CCK kit does. It gives a handshake to
Android devices so that it'll output digital audio to the device, the Hugo, the Mojo, or whatnot. And
so this power light will light up once you connect to Samsung. Now, Samsung in the latest OS lollipop
has allowed now, without the help of different apps, to output audio. Before you had to do a
download of an app like USB Pro Audio, or similar, essentially that had the drivers to tell the
Samsung to output digital. The USB Audio Pro comes with Class 1 and Class 2 drivers, so that really
helps out a lot depending on how old or how new your DAC is, that it will ensure the possibility
of connecting to and outputting digital audio to it. The bad news with the new lollipop OS
is that it's only got class one drivers. So you need a class 2 driver for the Mojo,
and so when you want to do things such as Tidal, Tidal doesn't have any drivers built into it,
so unfortunately it's relying on the OS to output digital. Well, because this is using the old class
1 Drive and the Mojo's using a class 2 driver, Tidal doesn't work, unfortunately. Now, with the
Chord Hugo it does. The reason being, the Chord Hugo had two USB inputs, one for HD audio and one
for SD audio. So the HD was used for doing DSD and high resolution from, let's say, a computer
like this. Oh, and the SD was used for connecting to a camera connection kit or an OTG cable and it
had the drivers necessary to make it run with, let's say, Tidal, for example. The Mojo is only
using one USB connector to do all of the digital switching for SD, HD, etc., so, unfortunately,
you couldn't have separate drivers in the USB connections. The other USB connection on the
Mojo is for powering it up, so until Samsung gets around to adding in those other Class two drivers,
Tidal, unfortunately, won't work. And this isn't the only device it won't work. We've got a bunch
of them that aren't working, so there are very few that are working that have both class 1 and
class 2 in the DAC themselves. But I think at some point, you know, Samsung will realize that this
is needed and a requirement for its customers, and so this will be taken care of in a future OS
update. Right here I've got a tablet, which in a tablet situation, most tablets, like the Surface
or the Dell Venue here, have a USB-A connection, so you're going to use one of our Silver Dragon
USB-A -- that's a mouthful -- to USB micro-B to connect to the Mojo. And once you connect to the
Mojo you'll need to download drivers from the Chord website. We've got a link to that download
on our Mojo page. You'll need to download the drivers and install them on your tablet so that
you can connect to this device. Now, we've got a couple of blogs where we give you a little
more hands-on instruction about what the windows control panel looks like for sound properties and
what you need to choose and pay. So we're going to put a link at the bottom of this video so that
you can go to that location and check it out. We also have another blog post that talks about USB
connections. It gets really into depth about camera connection kits and how they, you know,
do this handshake and OTG cables and how they work and why they're required to do a handshake
between an Android device and a DAC. We're going to post that link also on this video so you can go
take a look at that blog post, as well. It'll help a lot. Now, a couple of neat things that
I saw when I went to London for the launch party of the Mojo, and some of the questions that I've
gotten about the Mojo is in regards to its size. You know, it's a little bit smaller,
and this is an iPhone 6 plus, which is really big, but it's a little bit smaller than the iPhone 6,
the regular standard size. This was purposely done because Chord is going to come out with
a couple of accessories that are going to add on to the end of it. It's essentially like a little
brick attachment that you're going to attach on, and one of them is going to be a solution
to get rid of this long dongle. Essentially, what that block does is it swallows up the large end
of the camera connection kit, making it then a little short cable that'll plug into your phone.
So that'll be the first block, and the block is essentially this long, making it almost as long
as the iPhone 6. Three other adapters are going to be included, at some point, as well: One that's
going to be for adding Bluetooth to this device so you can connect to your other Bluetooth devices;
There's going to be a Wi-Fi option for connecting to your network and doing UPnP, where you can
actually send music from your server or your laptop straight to the Mojo instead of Bluetooth,
so that'll sound a lot better because it's got a much larger bandwidth; and then they're also going
to have an adapter where you can put SD cards with files on it. I'm assuming this is going
to be very similar to the Aurender Flow that we sell. The Aurender Flow, essentially you can add
an SSD card into the inside of the DAC headphone amp, and when you connect to a tablet, like this
Dell which only has one USB-A connection, you have a difficult time of struggling with, well,
am I going to connect an external hard drive, or am I gonna connect a DAC? Because there's not a
lot of storage on this piece, and so you need an external drive to add more file storage because
DSD files and such can become very large. So it's a very nice solution that Aurender Flow
essentially becomes an external hard drive as well as your headphone DAC and running to one
USB connection. Essentially, I think that's what Chord's going to do with their SD card attachment
here. They're going to give you a place to store more music for tablets that only have one USB
connection. Then the other connection option that we've just created is a new form fit that fits
between the Mojo and the AK products. It's just like the others, where it's a mini Toslink on one
end and a standard Toslink on the other, so you're going to connect that into the headphone output of
your AK product, which is a combination port -- it's both a headphone jack and a Toslink digital
output. And we've made this a hardened right-angle to right-angle connection, so when you connect it
to the back of the Mojo it's got a nice form fit. Very low-profile and easy when you stuff it into
some of your carrying bags. Once again, there is a little bit of a size difference between the Mojo
and the AK. Unfortunately, the block that Chord's doing will go on this end and won't fill in this
gap, so I've just been using our standard Moon Audio rubber bands, our medium size, and really
all I need is one at the top sides. It can hold the two together and they stay firmly in place.
I'd probably expect that at some point, just like what they did with the Chord Hugo, I imagine that
they're going to come out with some kind of case for the Mojo to make these arrangements a little
easier to deal with. So that's the cable for the connection to the AK products. Then you
can also use the exact same copy of that except in what's called a Flex Fit version. This one bends
around. So when you want to connect to your combo headphone jack Toslink connection on your MacBook
Pro, we've got one of those available for you as well. And, once again, when you connect to the
Apple using USB option, which we also can provide -- and you'll have to decide for yourself whether
you like the optical input versus the USB input. I know with some people with the Chord Hugo,
when connecting to a MacBook Pro, they've actually preferred the Toslink in some cases depending on
what software package you're using. Audirvana, Amara, etc. Each one has a different signature,
so sometimes you may find that the sound actually sounds better with Toslink versus USB. You'll have
to make that choice -- but we've got a cable for both situations, both USB-A to micro to
connect between your computer and your Mojo, or the mini Toslink to standard Toslink in a
Flex Form Fit connection. I think that's about it for different types of connections. You're
welcome to post questions or comments to this video, and we can do a follow-up video if there
are some more questions on how to get your Mojo connected to your iDevice, tablet, or computer.
Thank you.
(music)