Mojo Audio’s motto is "A bit closer to live," which to be honest is a sentiment I’ve never liked. To me great audio isn’t about trying -- and inevitably failing -- to mimic the ideal of live music. No, to me it’s its own thing, a venture in which I try to get closer and closer to the Platonic ideal of pure sound, which to me comes *before* music. Someone once said to me, "You care about the sound more than the music," to which I replied unapologetically, "Yeah, what’s wrong with that?"
I go into this digression to illustrate how amazed I was the first time I plugged in my new EVO DAC into my system. I was coming from the Mystique V3, which I had already loved, but the experience was uncanny. I had vacillated about what to listen to first, and settled on Annie Lennox’s "Nostalgia," because it’s a great recording that is sparse enough to let the sonic elements come to the fore. This sounds like an exaggeration, but I swear it’s true: I didn’t feel like I was listening to Annie live in the audience; I didn’t feel like she was singing right in front of me; I felt like I was *her* singing. I’m a dude who can’t sing for his life, so this was an odd experience, to say the least. I *do* play two instruments: flute and classical guitar, and I can state definitively that listening to good recordings of these instruments on the EVO feels uncannily like actually playing them.
To put it a different way, with the EVO there is no distance between the music and your brain. On headphones, it feels like the music is coming from within you, not like you are listening to it. On speakers the effect is obviously diminished, but it is still amazing. My wife has never appreciated my sound system--she puts up with because she knows it’s important to me. When she wants to listen to music, it’s iPhone speaker all the way. Anyway, I didn’t tell her I got a new DAC (don’t judge me!), but when I turned on my stereo for the first time with the EVO in place, she looked up from her book and said, "That sounds great!" This is the first time she had ever spontaneously complimented my system. I just smiled.
I had always considered PRAT a quality of amps, speakers, and headphones. But the PRAT on the EVO is out of this world. Again, the V3 was already a great DAC I was very happy with, but the EVO makes it sound sluggish and slow by comparison. I find myself unconsciously tapping my foot much more with the EVO. It’s hard to explain what a "fast DAC" means, but the speed and coherence of the sound gives the music an immediate, physical presence. The sound is neither "warm" nor "cool," the soundstage neither "wide" nor "narrow." Those words simply don’t apply to something of this caliber. It’s just pure unadulterated sound. That’s all I can say about it.
Sometimes I just want to have something playing in the background, and it sounds natural enough that it doesn’t demand your attention in the annoying way some audiophile systems do. But when you *do* turn your attention to it, the sound is an endless void that you can disappear into completely. To me the EVO finally bridges the sound with the music, and listening to it is akin to having spiritual experience on tap.
