Herb Reichert reviewed the Mojo Mystique X SE very favorably in Stereophile’s April 2023 issue.1 While he found that the dCS Bartók DAC made piano recordings sound crisper and more dramatic, “sounding bigger, tighter, and more forceful through the piano’s left-hand octaves” than they did through the Mystique X SE, “Mojo’s Mystique X SE … disappeared from my listening awareness more than any DAC I’d previously encountered.” He concluded that this nonoversampling (NOS) D/A processor “produced a unique, sophisticated listening experience that presented digital recordings as beautiful, probing, and engaging.”
In my measurements, I found that while the Mojo processor offered low levels of harmonic and intermodulation distortion and good channel separation, those characteristics were paired with relatively high levels of jitter-related artifacts through all three digital inputs—AES3, coaxial S/PDIF, and USB—and its resolution was limited to about 16 bits below 1kHz and 17 bits above about 4kHz. In addition, the vintage, 20-bit Analog Devices AD1862 DACs the Mojo uses demonstrated high linearity error at low levels, as a result of which a dithered tone at–90dBFS was reproduced almost 10dB too high in level. I wondered whether this behavior correlated with something Herb wrote in his review: that the Mojo “made piano tones glow and whisper, how all the little quiet notes—ones
