The one dominating fingerprint' of Chord's Toucan is noise - white noise, to be precise. This USB headphone amp truly benefits from the absence of spurious digital artefacts (unlike the Aqvox) or extensive PSU harmonics (unlike the Lehmann) but this is achieved only because, if such spikes were present, they are buried under a uniform carpet of noise. Hence the weak 72dB A-wtd S/N ratio even if, subjectively, such a uniform spread of noise can have a beneficial dithering effect. I'd rather see noise less obviously applied but it's interesting to note that the Toucan's low-level resolution is still good to about -90dBFs. The numerous distortion and jitter plots available via our website for the Toucan illustrate the relatively high noise floor although the distortion vs frequency curve [red infill, below] is genuinely illustrative of a dominant 3rd and milder 2nd/4th harmonics that accelerate upwards with increasing frequency. The response [black trace] is flat and will be broadly unaffected by headphone impedance thanks to the low 11ohm output, even if the maximum output level is just 1.15V.
展开▼
机译：Chord巨嘴鸟的一个主要指纹是噪音-准确地说是白噪音。这款USB耳机放大器的真正好处是没有伪造的数字假象（与Aqvox不同）或广泛的PSU谐波（与Lehmann不同），但这仅是因为（如果存在）这些尖峰，它们被掩盖在均匀的噪声覆盖下。因此，即使从主观上讲，这种均匀的噪声传播也可以具有有益的抖动效果，但72dB的A-wtd S / N比很弱。我宁愿看到不太明显地应用噪声，但有趣的是，巨嘴鸟的低分辨率仍然可以达到约-90dBF。通过Toucan网站可通过我们的网站获得的大量失真和抖动图说明了较高的本底噪声，尽管失真与频率曲线[下图中的红色填充]确实说明了占主导地位的三次谐波和次谐波/ 4/4谐波随着频率增加而加速向上。即使最大输出电平仅为1.15V，由于其11ohm的低输出，响应（黑色轨迹）也很平坦，并且不受耳机阻抗的影响。
展开▼
