Chord Electronics Poly hands wireless chops to Mojo DAC

Chord Electronics has just unveiled Poly. This hands high-res wireless streaming, SD card and network music playback to their award-winning Mojo.

Chord Electronics’ new Poly module boosts the Mojo headphone amp/DAC to become a fully fledged high-resolution wireless network music player, streamer and SD card playback device. It also enables full wireless playback and control from smartphones.

From the ancient Greek word meaning ‘a large number’ or ‘many’, this moniker is ideal for a product that is capable of wide-ranging functionality.

The new portable device removes the need for a wired link between phone and Mojo. Not only that, it also opens up a world of content to be decoded and played back using Chord’s proprietary DAC technology.

Poly parts

Chord Electronics’s latest module  is based on a condensed high-level PC. It is a combination of a data server, DLNA receiver, Wi-Fi hub, Bluetooth module and SD card (using MPD) functionality, and highly sophisticated software.

It acts as a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hub and can access music in a number of ways. Connectivity options include streaming over Wi-Fi, network storage devices (NAS) and collections stored on SD cards using Mail Player Daemon.

Bluetooth connectivity and AirPlay functionality provide real flexibility with smartphones. You can essentially have a Chord Electronics multi-room system as you can hook-up mutilple Mojo/Poly combinations.

Poly has been designed for full control using the best (and most familiar) user interface in the world — the smartphone.

Chord Electronics and its design partners have made it fully mobile. Shove it a pocket or bag and enjoy nine hours of playback from the LiPo rechargable battery.

Both Mojo and Poly can be simultaneously charged using Poly’s Micro USB connector.

The case is precision-machined from aircraft-grade aluminium and hand assembled in the UK.

Playback

Poly is compatible with the latest high-resolution-audio file types. It plays nice with PCM files up to 768kHz resolution and DSD64 to DSD512 (Octa-DSD). This high-quality SD card reader/player frees up smartphone memory and storage. No more filling up your phone with stacks of tunes.

You can also use music players such as Roon (excluding SD cards). Supported file types (to be confirmed) include: ACC, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, OGG VORBIS, ALAC, WMA and MP3.

Poly price and availability

Poly will be available in early 2017 for £499