Chord Electronics Quartet Upscaler
CHORD ELECTRONICS QUARTET UPSCALER LAUNCHED WITH NEW BLACKBIRD WTA FILTER
Chord Electronics has officially launched the Chord Quartet, a new reference-level digital upscaler featuring the company’s latest Blackbird WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter technology alongside a built-in analogue-to-digital converter (ADC).
Following several appearances at HiFi Shows over the last few months, including The Bristol HiFi Show 2026 and Audio Show Deluxe 2026, the new Chord Electronics Quartet Upscaler is officially available.
CHORD ELECTRONICS QUARTET UPSCALER
The Chord Electronics Quartet Upscaler has been developed by digital designer Rob Watts and marks the first Chord Electronics upscaler to include an ADC, allowing analogue sources including turntables to benefit from the unit’s digital processing and upscaling functions. The new model is designed to partner with all Chord Electronics DACs and is intended to complement the company’s flagship DAVE DAC.
BLACKBIRD WTA FILTER TECHNOLOGY
The Quartet introduces Chord Electronics’ new Blackbird WTA filter architecture, which uses four million filter taps implemented across five Xilinx FPGAs. According to the company, this represents a significant increase in processing capability over the earlier M Scaler design.
Chord Electronics says the new filter has been designed to improve timing accuracy during digital audio reconstruction by mathematically rebuilding information lost during analogue-to-digital conversion. Unlike FFT-based processing commonly used in software applications, the Quartet performs its filtering directly in hardware.
The company states that the Blackbird WTA filter aims to improve transient accuracy, spatial detail and tonal realism in digital playback.
CHORD ELECTRONICS QUARTET ADC DESIGN
A major addition to the Quartet is its integrated Pulse Array ADC stage. Chord Electronics says the ADC has been developed to minimise aliasing distortion and improve timing precision when converting analogue sources to digital.
The ADC section uses proprietary decimation filtering and a 104 MHz noise-shaper output, with the aim of preserving timing information during recording and playback. Chord Electronics says this allows analogue sources and archived recordings to benefit from the same upscaling process available to digital inputs.
TWO-BOX DESIGN AND FEATURES
The Quartet is supplied as a two-box design with a separate power supply developed by Rob Watts. Chord Electronics says the power supply incorporates RF rejection technology intended to reduce unwanted noise within the signal path.
Additional features include a 108-bit lossless digital EQ with ±18 dB adjustment, programmable latency settings from 10 milliseconds to three seconds and connectivity supporting output resolutions up to 768 kHz. Rear panel connections include isolated USB-B, dual BNC, optical digital connections and RCA analogue inputs for the ADC section.
Chord Electronics will demonstrate the Quartet publicly at High End 2026 in Vienna from the 4th of June.
CHORD ELECTRONICS QUARTET PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
The Chord Electronics Quartet is available to order now and is priced at £25,000. It is supplied with a five-year warranty and is available in Argent Silver or Jett Black finishes. The optional Choral Ensemble Stand System is priced at £1,595 per tier.
HiFi PiG says: Great to see the Chord Quartet now available!
