anastasia the singer

This weekend I played with the new Gem DAC and put it against a default choice, the Squeezebox Duet.

The Chord Gem is a Bluetooth DAC costing £399. As per their main marketing, I fed it from my Sony Ericson phone - a recent W890i model that I really like. The phone was free on a contract. If you don’t have a mobile you’d maybe pay £100 upwards for one that supports AD2P Bluetooth.

The Duet is a network music player that includes a remote control that contains a screen. The package costs £280.

The system that the two sources were played through was Arcam FMJ integrated and Spendor SA1.

I have previously expressed that I think the Gem is a silly idea. Storage on a mobile is limited, as is Bluetooth bandwidth. The Duet supports much quicker networking - WiFi - comes with its own remote, and talks to a computer, which can provide an infinite amount of storage for music. Add this to the fact that the Duet is over £100 less, it is a much betetr solution, IMO.

Sound

The music on my mobile was all in MP3 format at various bitrates and included Andrea Bocelli, Astrud Gilberto, Barry Lyndon Soundtrack, Joy Divison, Kraftwerk, and Wes Montgomery.

I had the same files on a computer too, but obviously much more, and scope for lossless files.

The Gem sounded fine on the simple vocal music but was really awful with everything else. Joy Division was quite awful, most noticeably introducing nasty digital artifacts on cymbals. The same mp3 track via Squeezebox was much more acceptable.

Across the board the Duet sounded nicer, more full, less harsh.

The Duet controller worked much more quickly. When transmitting music files out of my mobile via Bluetooth the phone became slow and laggy when navigating menus. It really isn’t the device to base a music system on!

Conclusions

The Duet was he obvious winner. It sounded better, had a nice interface, better architecture, and less cost!

Other considerations would be a Beresford DAC @ £100 or a Cambridge DAC @ £200, using a Duet or Apple source.

To me the Gem is a classic example of a HiFi co. attempting to bring out a computer product, and failing miserably.

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