Our Product of the Year is Chord's brilliant Mojo. This is a stunning achievement packing in a full dose of Chord's proprietary number crunching tech in a neat package that takes up as much desk space as a credit card. It's portable with the internal battery keeping things going for around 8 hours when starting with a full charge.
It sounds great, easily outperforming most alternatives we've heard below the grand mark, including our long-term favourite, the Audiolab M-DAC, which is no easy feat. Chord Electronics wins further awards for both the 2Qute (£995) and Hugo (£1400), making it a bumper awards haul for the company.
See all our What Hi-Fi? Awards 2015 winners
Chord has had a firm grip of the £1000 DAC market in recent years and the new 2Qute just reinforces that. It's built into a compact case and has a good range of inputs covering the usual trio of USB, optical and coax.
Performance-wise there's little at this price that comes close. Naim's DAC-V1 is an alternative worth considering due to a wider range of features, including digital preamp capability, but for us the 2Qute's advantage in sound quality is too great to ignore.
The next step up through the Chord range gets you the Hugo. This smart unit offers all the great sound of the 2Qute but adds portability and Bluetooth. It's a terrific performer.
Our entry-level award goes to the £260 Oppo HA-2. This is another portable unit, wallet sized and very well made. Such is the build quality that we still find it hard to believe that Oppo hasn’t made some sort of mistake and underpriced the product.
Sound quality is excellent for the money, delivering a combination of insight and dynamic subtlety no rival we’ve heard can match. If you’re after a top quality entry-level DAC to make you computer or phone sound better, this is a brilliant place to start.
MORE: Awards 2015: Best DACs
