[maxh22]

Dave cant use outside.

Pshhh... I have power outlets in my backyard, I'm sure others do too. If someone has a burning urge to listen to Dave outside I'm sure they will find a way

 

[canali]

c'mon jmills...go big ..or go home...
add in some speakers to that pack, with the DAVE, your conditioner
cables etc...you're all set

portability rules supreme:!

 

[jmills8]

c'mon jmills...go big ..or go home...
add in some speakers to that pack, with the DAVE, your conditioner
cables etc...you're all set

portability rules supreme:!

He more man than I.

 

[Whazzzup]

lavry cable connector with built in cck? They are out of stock but somehow i think its apple patent infringement...? i really want no cck.
sorry realize it may not be an iPhone, love those DHC cables as well.

 

[guerph]

No disrespect to Chord or the customers they sell to (of which I am happy to say I am)...but What Hi-Fi? gives 5-star reviews to garbage bins. They're the trashy tabloid of Hi-Fi news and reviews. I'd sooner pick up a Maxim for Hi-Fi recommendations. I'm sure the new Hugo will get lots of glowing/5-star reviews (deservedly so), but getting a glowing review from What Hi-Fi? is like being handed a Medal of Honor for your service in Vietnam, from a President that couldn't find where you served on map...a map which ONLY showed Vietnam...and he'd probably still point to the blue part as land.

I will say this about What Hi-Fi?...they bring you some of the absolute finest sponsored content you can find...

 

[514077]

Well, diverging from the portable DAVE talk, my guy says the Hugo2s should be coming in next week. Don't care what colour I get as long as it has that silver noise reduction coating on it. Or was it black?

 

[Peter Hyatt]

Judging content by the paid ads rather than the content?

 

[ahossam]

Silver coating acts as galvanic isolation while black weighs less but buffers radio frequency interference. You have to choose.

Is this true? If it is then I'll be damned! I LOVE black colors.

 

[supervisor]

Is this true? If it is then I'll be damned! I LOVE black colors.

no.

 

[Doody]

ROTFLMAO.

It was a joke, folks.

The color has no impact on performance!!!!!!

Doody

 

[x RELIC x]

I noticed this with Dave, and even more so with Dave/M scaler; the better the electronics, the more profound the changes with different headphones. And it's difficult to predict - some HP that were before I thought of as moderate, became bad, and some become much better in my appreciation. Of course very bad never becomes very good and vice versa!

Man, one thing I've noticed with the Hugo2, like the DAVE, is it's very honest to the headphone you have plugged in to it, at least to my ears. I'm going through my stable of headphones for my review and I plug in the LCD-XC.... not good. The pair is prickly and harsh to my ears. What I perceive happening is the transparency of the Hugo2 (and DAVE) allows the nature of the headphone to come through clearer than other gear I use (and have used). The headphone signature is 'enhanced'. The ETHER Flow, for example, sounds slightly warmer with more mid-bass from the Hugo2 than from other gear. The LCD-XC sounds brighter and more harsh than normal. The Nighthawk sounds relatively cleaner/faster and not quite as thick (still very warm though). The Hugo2 doesn't change a headphone's signature, but rather expands it to my ears.

Uhg, a car analogy... Almost like the difference between a cars performance being hampered by the tires. Average tires will level the playing field somewhat, certainly not enough to not be able to tell a difference between vehicles, but exceptional tires will allow the cars handling and performance to be felt much easier. In this analogy headphones are the car and the source is the tires. The headphone has the greatest impact on the sound signature, but a good source will more accurately show that signature.

I'll try to expand more on this in my review as it's difficult to explain but I thought it would be interesting to share early.

 

[Rob Watts]

Man, one thing I've noticed with the Hugo2, like the DAVE, is it's very honest to the headphone you have plugged in to it, at least to my ears. I'm going through my stable of headphones for my review and I plug in the LCD-XC.... not good. The pair is prickly and harsh to my ears. What I perceive happening is the transparency of the Hugo2 (and DAVE) allows the nature of the headphone to come through clearer than other gear I use (and have used). The headphone signature is 'enhanced'. The ETHER Flow, for example, sounds slightly warmer with more mid-bass from the Hugo2 than from other gear. The LCD-XC sounds brighter and more harsh than normal. The Nighthawk sounds relatively cleaner/faster and not quite as thick (still very warm though). The Hugo2 doesn't change a headphone's signature, but rather expands it to my ears.

Uhg, a car analogy... Almost like the difference between a cars performance being hampered by the tires. Average tires will level the playing field somewhat, certainly not enough to not be able to tell a difference between vehicles, but exceptional tires will allow the cars handling and performance to be felt much easier. In this analogy headphones are the car and the source is the tires. The headphone has the greatest impact on the sound signature, but a good source will more accurately show that signature.

I'll try to expand more on this in my review as it's difficult to explain but I thought it would be interesting to share early.

 

[Rob Watts]

I noticed this with Dave in that HP that were bad often became very bad; and good ones became much better. I guess the more transparent, the easier it is to hear transducers deficiencies and strengths. I have had HP that I rated before as moderate then sounding very good too following an improvement in electronics. It of course means that one has to be very careful about making hard and fast judgments; I guess that philosophy could be applied to all spheres of life!

 

[headfry]

No disrespect to Chord or the customers they sell to (of which I am happy to say I am)...but What Hi-Fi? gives 5-star reviews to garbage bins. They're the trashy tabloid of Hi-Fi news and reviews. I'd sooner pick up a Maxim for Hi-Fi recommendations. I'm sure the new Hugo will get lots of glowing/5-star reviews (deservedly so), but getting a glowing review from What Hi-Fi? is like being handed a Medal of Honor for your service in Vietnam, from a President that couldn't find where you served on map...a map which ONLY showed Vietnam...and he'd probably still point to the blue part as land.

I will say this about What Hi-Fi?...they bring you some of the absolute finest sponsored content you can find...

Not sure what your beef is with WhatHifi but I've almost always found their reviews spot on, from the one on the Mojo
to the Grado GS1000i to the AQ Jitterbug, etc.........

I've been reading their reviews for over 40 years and still enjoy them, find them to be generally
accurate and well written. Professional audiophile reviewers with a passion for the hobby.

It will be interesting to see. how their impressions of Hugo2 jibe with others, I
predict very well.

 

[Christer]

This post rang a bell with me, as it covers something that has puzzled me for several years - how it is that recently, as I have made progress with digital, that poorer quality recordings are so much more musically involving - when in the past the opposite was true.

I have been designing DAC's from 1988 - initially using regular audio chips - then from 1994 using my own pulse array DAC technology using FPGA's. Then in 1999 I was handling the whole signal path from digital input to analogue output, and developed the WTA filter. So I have seen major changes in performance, and generally speaking as improvements were made, then with the better transparency, the gulf between high quality recordings and poorer ones became much more apparent; so much so that poor recordings were un-listenable. And I kind of accepted this vicious circle, because I knew deep down that the only way the audio industry would make progress was by raising technical standards - and my life-time goal was being able to close that huge gap from live un-amplified sound to reproduced sound - that gap being two-fold - pure sound quality on one hand and musicality on the other. With musicality, by this I mean the ability to be emotionally involved in the musical performance - and live un-amplified is so very involving - the life and soul of music is seriously mangled by reproduced audio.

So I was making progress both technically and audibly, and musical recordings were getting more involving - but as progress was being made, poorer recordings just sounded unacceptable. And this path was true until Oct 2012 when I listened to the first Hugo. And it was a profound shock. Hugo was doing things that I had never heard before from any DAC. Now I won't bore you with the technical details, but I was doing things with the FPGA design that I had never been able to do before. Also, the quality of simulation tools had gotten a lot better, and I could analyse and do digital measurements on individual blocks of my code - verilog modules - that I could not do before - and Hugo was the first audiophile product to get these module upgrades.

When I first heard it, it sounded very natural, with exceptional timing (being able to hear the starting and stopping of notes properly) and range of timbre (before piano sounded tonally boring - now each key had life, vitality and vibrancy). And I found that it was if a veil had been lifted, and I could connect to the soul of the music. I dsicovered that I was listening to much more music, as Hugo had an addictive quality. But what was truly bizarre was that poor quality recordings still sounded poor technically - but the quality of connecting to the music was still there - and I could listen to 1930's mono recordings and enjoy the music. Indeed, I have actively bought archive mono recordings - something I never would have done 4 years ago.

I once chatted to a recording engineer, who used Hugo for mastering. He summarized it perfectly - "Hugo tells me exactly what is wrong with the recording - but it also tells me what is right with the music."

Now at that time, I did not understand exactly why Hugo was so much better musically - how did that quality of connecting to the music work technically? And why is it poor quality recordings sound so good musically? It does not make rational sense, as normally better transparency equates to poor sound for bad recordings.

This takes me back to last year, where I attended a Hi-Fi show in Poland. Chord's distributor has a very interesting segment, where they play back original Beatles master tapes on an analogue reel to reel. These master tapes were used to make the Beatles pressings in Eastern Europe.

And when they play them back, they sound awful. Flat. Noisy. Distorted. Stereo that is left right or center. Bright.

But...

When you ignore the audiophile things that are wrong you hear things that are very right. Notes that start and stop correctly. Timbre variations. Instruments that sound solid with power. Bass where you can follow the tune.

In short, its very musical and engaging, in spite of the audiophile things that are (seriously) wrong - but this does not detract from the music. And each instrument, even though its noisy and distorted sounds - real.

So how does this get back to digital? Digital is a mincing/reconstituting machine. It takes analogue in on the ADC, samples it, then the DAC recovers the original analogue waveform that was in the ADC and reproduces it.

So it's like a mincemeat machine, where you take prime mature fillet beef, and mince it (samples the signal). Then the DAC comes along and reconstitutes it and returns prime fillet beef (recovers the original analogue signal). Now in principle, what should come out with an ideal ADC and DAC is perfectly reconstituted fillet beef - indistinguishable from the original. But the reality is it comes out like meat that your dog would not eat - but maybe your kids would. And the reason for this is that the ear/brain is incredibly sensitive to minute changes in the re-constituted (interpolated) waveform.

Now when Hugo first came out, I had no idea where this SQ improvement was coming from technically - being able to hear the starting and stopping and notes, being able to reproduce timbre properly, and getting the sense of instrument power correctly - and these aspects are crucial for getting musicality right. And at the time, I didn't care too much, as I had hit the maximum constraints of the FPGA. But I needed to understand it, as this allows for true progress. And with the Dave program, I did indeed manage to find out how and why the qualities I heard were happening in purely technical terms. In a simple nutshell, I had seriously under estimated how sensitive the ear/brain is to the timing errors that occur when a DAC reconstitutes the original analogue signal; and it seems that any difference from the original, no matter how small is extremely significant musically.

Now with Hugo 2 I have an FPGA that is about 5 times more powerful, together with all the knowledge gained from Dave; and for me it gets me much closer to the original master tape. Because the mincemeat/reconstitution is much more accurate, you do indeed get the best of both worlds - more transparency, but with the ability to connect to the musical soul even with poor quality recordings. So Hugo 2 in my opinion - and we all have different sensitivities so you will have to judge by listening for yourself - gets much closer to the original master tape sound, and so I do indeed enjoy older recordings more. That's the quality I found so musically appealing on the Beatles master tapes, in spite of objectively poor sound quality.

I was listening to a 1930's mono recording this morning on a Dave and M scaler - and yes it sounded distorted, and very noisy - but - it sounded like a real piano nonetheless. Something that conventional digital, because of the poor reconstitution, absolutely fails to do.

Rob

Interesting explanation of goals and means to those goals.
My ideal DAC would be one that is capable of not only delivering more than the usual "digital minced meat" or at best beef, but actually the whole cow.
Live unamplifed music is the whole frigging cow, not just the beef to me.
MY HOLY COW.
By the way does HUGO 2 use super capacitors or not?
And if not? why not?
If a handy person can even add super capacitors to HUGO 1 and hear a clear improvement in SQ having done so,one would expect such parts to be taken for granted in an upgraded product like HUGO 2 wouldn't one?
There seems to be no technical hindrance doing so and you did so with HUGO TT.
And told me that the super capacitors was one of the reasons TT sounded clearly better than HUGO.
Even if HUGO 2 will sound very good indeed via headphones I also suspect I would have the same trouble fitting my reference RCA cables, with HUGO 2.
My reference cables make a HUGE DIFFERENCE in my home system.
" For those who hear no differences between cables I can only say have your ears cleaned or get a better system or play more demanding music material."

Judging from this frankly not very good, but anyway,first HIFI press review, quoted above, it seems they couldn't fit that reference cable to HUGO 2 during their review.
With all connection problems moaned about by more users than me, of HUGO 1. Why was HUGO 2 not built to accept high grade cables like the one both I and obviously also this HIFI magazine use as a reference?
The review even quotes HUGO 2 as being sligthly smaller than HUGO 1 instead of the desired ,slightly bigger, which would easily have provided just enough room for a proper full size USB connection instead of that flimsy little micro one, and a clearly better and sturdier RCA connection plus galvanic isolation, while still retaining a portable size.
Three imho very disappointing and unfortunate examples where design and looks seem to have ruled strongly over ultimate SQ, and obviously limiting its usablity in a high end home system.
What good is a remote if you can't connect a high quality cable to it in the first place.
Sorry if I come through a big moaner again. But I had slightly higher expectations as to build quality and practical usability aspects from HUGO 2.
I really like it when theory marries practice and does so at a reasonable price.
It seems I will have to carefully audition both Benchmark's DAC 3 and some other competitors' DACs before deciding. For one thing I know that DAC 2 gives HUGO a good run for its money and betters it is some respects in a high end home system Now it seems this review puts DAC 3 in direct competition with HUGO 2.
And does so for purely sonic reasons.
They obviously did not like the looks of the Benchmark much.
Personally I couldn't care less about looks and design. I listen to my equipment and and look with suspicion at products that hide behind fancy looks.
I won't buy HUGO 2 if it only proves to be sligthly better via headphones over HUGO in practical use.