It's not bad, but it's not the best, and pretty much everything that measures better is using a more conventional architecture and in many cases is significantly cheaper. Chords use of FPGAs gets points for novelty but I don't think it has any practical merit.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/c...
Even their $14,000 monster desktop DAC/Amp gets beaten by units a fraction of the price in objective measurements. The audiophile market has taken a fascinating turn since ASR arrived on the scene, the snake oil salesmen are still on their bullshit but there has been an uptick in companies doing legitimately good engineering and making products with phenomenal performance for dirt cheap. There are DAC/Amp combos under $200 which are objectively perfectly transparent well beyond the theoretical limits of lossless CD audio now.
However, the actual analog parts of Chord's system around the fast DAC and the upscaling circuit seemed to be sort of suspect to me, from the handling of reference clocks to the nature of the output amplifiers. I'm glad ASR has confirmed those suspicions before I bought one.
At some point, I started a project making a multibit DAC running at 1 Msps with the same kind of FPGA upscaling (although ADI's SHARC DSPs are amazing) but a much more conventional frontend and better handling of clocks, but I realized it was too complicated to do while also doing all the other things I was doing at the time (and way too complicated now). The idea is still on the shelf for later (although it's probably already obsolete as a concept - delta-sigma is really good).