Chord Hugo 2

I have the Hugo 2 for a few weeks at home right now and find the "in your face detailing" to be rather fake in the context of oversharpening and "conturing". Kinda like Beyer Zing, just less extreme. Still prominent and always present.

Also find it rather soft and wimpy vs. the Bifrost 2 (especially bass) and the staging flat and not deep with my El Cheapo KRKs - also easily noticable from headphones (HD 800, HE-6, even HE-5XX). I want to make a certain innuendo about taps but let me just say all this tap marketing came crashing down pretty soon. There's nothing the Hugo 2 does what would remotely get me to buy one.

Plenty of times I've been advised to get the Hugo 2 for transparency, neutral and massive details to put before my upcoming pass amp but rarely did witness a piece of gear tail so hard.

 

After the honeymoon period with my Hugo2, the following rambles are my final thoughts. This DAC is very clean compared to my YggyGS. The sound stage is better and I can hear further into the "room" however I find myself slightly giving the edge to the Yggdrasil. IMO the Yggdrasil sounds like a balance between a softer R2R and a clinical clean sabre Dac with hard edges. The Hugo sounds like the sabre but without the hard edges but has no softness it just displays what is there. I guess the audiophile word is "transparency". My brain says the Hugo2 is better but my body "chair dances" with the Yggdrasil. Also I loathe the USB input, I have just given up and only use the optical input. The crossfeed is great for headphones and IEMs but since it lacks a 4.4mm balanced out, no points added no points deducted. Wonderful "portable" Dac , small, tons of features but not a replacement for the Yggdrasil. On a side note it pairs with my STAX surprisingly well through the SRM-353xBK the speed of the Hugo makes the STAX sound even faster doubling down on the strengths of my electrostats.

 

A bit off-topic for the Hugo thread, but I thought I would chime in here briefly. The main distinction between closed-form filters and design algorithms like Parks-McClellan is that the latter use an optimization procedure, most of which are based on gradient descent, to determine the filter coefficients. This means that you technically never know the "true" coefficients; rather, you arrive at them asymptotically, getting closer and closer as your optimization chugs along. Probably the most useful example of a closed-form filter is a windowed sinc filter, where the sinc function is the inverse FFT of the ideal reconstruction filter (specified in the frequency domain). This filter is closed-form because both the sinc function and the window are specified analytically, so you really do know the coefficients and can specify them to arbitrary precision. I don't pretend to know Schiit's special sauce, but I have programmed resampling algorithms based on closed-form linear-phase filters which act as true interpolants in the time-domain, meaning they retain all of the original samples. The most straightforward way starts with choosing a windowed sinc filter, and then taking the following steps:

1.) Choose an integer upsampling factor L, and integer downsampling factor M, so that the final sampling rate is L/M times the original. (For audio upsampling, you'd only need M != 1 for funky initial sampling rates.)

2.) Upsample or "expand" the data by the factor L, by zero-padding the signal. For example, for L=2, the expanded signal consists of the original samples alternating with zeros, one after the other.

3.) Filter the upsampled signal using the windowed sinc filter where the normalized cutoff frequency is the minimum of (pi/L,pi/M). This is the reconstruction filter, which is also responsible for anti-aliasing (or anti-imaging, if you like). For example, for (L=2, M=1), the cutoff would be the Nyquist frequency of the upsampled signal.

4.) Downsample or "decimate" the original data by the factor M, by removing samples sequentially from the filtered signal. For example, for M=2, the decimated signal consists of the filtered signal where every other sample has been removed.

It's a nice idea, and not too hard to understand or implement. The one caveat is that the filter needs to have a gain of L in order for the amplitude scaling to work out right. This procedure ends up being a good approximation of the infinite-sequence Shannon-Whittaker interpolation. Oppenheim and Schafer have a good chapter on this in their book (ch 4) for anybody who wants to nerd out on this stuff [pdf available here].

 

Perhaps a bit of a shite contribution, but as someone who has listened to plenty of Schiit and Chord dacs, I always find these threads so fun to read through. It always feels like Chord vs Schiit has more people going for either side than most other brands.

I think both brands have weaknesses in their respective products especially if you're trying to stay within similar price points (So no 20k dave + blu nonsense vs a 2k Yggdrasil).

But I always get a kick out of the comparisons where it's literally like:

Post 1.
Hugo 2 is the goat, what a portable set up!
Post 2.
Hugo 2 made me realize humanity has no hope
Post 3.
Yggdrasil is so bad I prefer Mojo which also sucks
Post 4.
I'd take a slap in the face over a Qutest

It just makes me laugh how back and forth it is between threads, sites, or even consecutive posts in this thread. I hope people posting their impressions and reading through these threads 1. Don't take it personally if their preferred product isn't favored, but 2. realize that for whatever reason, this seems like a fun comparison that you can really only answer by hearing them yourself.

It seems like at the very least there's a strong difference in preferences that manifests itself in these comparisons. I wonder if we'd find a correlation if people also listed the types of music and sound sigs they prefer.

For example, I prefer a neutral leaning warm signature, and a lot of rock music. I find I prefer Chord's sig.

 

To me it seems like there are:

- 'Absolutists' (as in: 'xxx is shite while yyy is GOAT'), and
- 'Relativists' (as in: 'depending on my mood, the music I'm enjoying, and the other elements in my chain, sometimes I prefer xxx, while other times I prefer yyy'.)

I know, I made those words up

I'm clearly a relativist as I enjoy both my Hugo2go and my Gungnir Multibit ==> Liquid Platinum/DSHA-3F rig very much.

I've yet to stick my H2go into my desktop rig, so can't say how I feel about Gungnir Multibit vs Hugo 2 feeding my amps.

 

Whoa necropost!

After a week and change with the Hugo 2, I have no ragrets. Really the only thing missing is the EQ functionality from the Mojo 2, which I thought I wouldn’t miss but I actually do for certain headphones. Outside of that, it’s exactly what I wanted. I’m using it almost exclusively with 2go and an Android-based color e-ink reader as a control device. This is a setup I’ve been working on for a while, and the idea is to have something to control playback in the evening without looking at a full emissive LCD or OLED display.

The good:

• Detail! More to the point, detail without fatigue.
• No treble fuckery that I can hear. Any time I think it’s going to do it, it manages to stay on the controlled and smooth side of the line. This is something I’m noticing with higher-end gear: you get treble detail without the pain.
• Sense of space/imaging is natural without being exaggerated. Nicely done.
• Crossfeed is the same as the Mojo 2 as far as I can tell, and absolutely essential for hard-panned recordings.
• Form factor is nice for a “transportable” device.
• Sounds utterly fantastic when using the 2go as source.
• Pairs well with Pietus, and surprisingly also with Jot 2. The latter really showed me how much it still has to give detail-wise.
• I expected the remote control to be a piece of plastic from the photos online, but no, it’s a solid chunk of aluminum.

The bad:

• Chord’s user interface still sucks balls.
• Desperately needs a low gain mode for sensitive headphones and hot recordings. On a lot of headphones (e.g. Meze 109s, Focals) I’m down in the “red” for attenuation, which I believe puts the noise floor closer than it should be for 16 bits of dynamic range.
• The headphone amp/buffer isn’t much better than the Mojo’s, even though the DAC is clearly better.
• Probably a consequence of the previous two items, the Clear OGs and Meze 109s don’t pair well with the built-in amp. All bass/slam all the time, but clarity suffers.

The ugly:

• Can’t turn off the lights entirely; the “dim” mode is still too bright for a dark room.
• The USB input sucks when connected directly to an iPhone/iPad as a source.
• Sounds best overall with 2go. If you don’t have one, you’ll need a nice USB isolator.
• 2go ugliness:
  • The MPD implementation sucks, but I can kinda make it work using M.A.L.P. as the control app.
  • uPnP/DLNA sucks. Don’t waste your time.
  • Needs headless Plexamp badly. Sure it supports Roon, but I like my metadata as I’ve entered it.
  • 2go consumes the USB input, so you’ll either need to separate it out and use 2yu or use another input if you have other sources.
• Pricing is ridiculous.
• No 4.4mm output, even for single-ended, meaning 4.4mm cable consolidators need to be sure to have an adapter.
• microUSB. In 2025. Need I say more?
  • Chord has said there’s an “input multiplexer” accessory with USB-C input that will go with the Hugo 2 and Suzi amp, but I haven’t seen details yet.

Best headphone pairings with the built-in amp: DCA E3, Aeon Noire XO
Acceptable: Elex, LCD-2C, DT 1990 Pro
Disappointing: Clear OG, Meze 109 Pro
No-go: Celestee (too much gain), HE6se V2 (not enough gain)
Utterly based: KPH40
Not tried yet: MM-100, ATH-A990Z, ATH-R70x Refine, DT 880 Pro 600R, Aeon Closed X, Elegia, SR325x, Edition XS, Porta Pro, Para, HD 58X/6XX/800 S, MDR-*, Bokeh Open

Despite the quirks and complaints, the Hugo 2 + 2go is likely to earn a permanent or semi-permanent spot in my rotation simply due to the versatility. Even more surprisingly, I’m probably going to pick up a Poly for the Mojo 2 as well so I have a smaller version of the same setup for travel/coffee shop purposes. MPD client bugs aside, the experience of using the 2go with the Android e-ink tablet is exactly what I was looking for. The major disappointment is simply in how well it pairs directly with the Clear OG and 109 Pros, but using it with Pietus fixes that nicely.

 

not to derail, but what reader are you using?

 

It’s a BOOX Go Color 7 Gen II. I might get a larger device at some point, but this works well as a basic control for the 2go and for the Pis running Plexamp.