Why did you object to the Chord Mojo conclusion?
There is really nothing broken in Chord Mojo. It performs well in a variety of tests. The issue with it is so much technical hype about its superiority that one is left empty after seeing performance that is well below state-of-the-art. We have DACs at less than half the price easily outperforming it on many tests. I cannot see any technical benefit to its design approach. On the contrary, that approach brings with it much higher cost, and power consumption. Combine that with the poor user interface and the Chord Mojo is simply not my cup of tea.
Because he's more having a go at the designer who happily fields questions and explains his thinking behind what he's done on other forums and as he can't find anything really wrong with it simply states it's not broken.
In my opinion regarding his comments I'm not sure he really understands the unit nor why the FPGA approach has been taken.
I own a Chord Mojo and the Topping D50S/P50 (along with a DX3 PRO and Cyrus Soundkey) which when you add in the cost of cables cost pretty much the same. They sound very different from each other, both sound very good in their own way. So there isn't much higher cost from the Topping and the Mojo has the added flexibility of being able to be used as a mobile device (just about).
It's reason for it's technical approach is that it sounds different from the pack, much different, from the ESS and AKM dacs at around the same and lower price.
The same approach has let Chord go all the way up through to the Dave and whether or not you enjoy the sound of their dacs you certainly can't say they don't have their unique sound. So trickling that technology and approach down to the price of a Mojo should be commended a little bit more in my opinion. You don't get many high end manufacturers wanting to gamble at that price level, but the man doesn't like praising high end manufacturers, it goes against what he's trying to do.