Rob Watts
Member of the Trade: Chord Electronics
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2014
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I am slightly confused by this paragraph @Rob Watts ! Do you mean the DSD filtering in DAVE is better than the original Hugo but Hugo 2 is even better? What about Blu2?
Yes technically it is better in that the filtering is greater than 200dB at 88.2kHz - so less out of band distortion and noise, and a warmer more natural SQ. But it still decimates. I prefer it to the DSD+ mode on Dave, which is why this new filter is used on Blu 2.
Congrats, and welcome to the Club!
Mine sounded great from the start, but I found the treble to be slightly enhanced or rather separated from the rest during the first two days, an issue that's completely disappeared after that. Later I read Rob Watts' comparison between his used unit and a brand new one, which sounded exactly the same to his ears. So maybe I have to accept that it was all just in my mind. After all the phenomenon is real, as it doesn't just happen to me...
I have had about 8 units (different prototype PCB's) and couldn't say I ever heard changes that I could put down to hardware break-in. But many times I would hear a change one month in with new code on old units; this I put down to brain break-in - most common being he sense of the soundstage opening up with deeper depth. Having said all that, all brand new units had a lot of measurements done beforehand, so would have clocked up 8 hours or more before listening.
I thought all Chord DACs convert DSD to PCM internally to apply the filtering...
Yes they do. But this conversion in the M scaler is done by the new Hugo 2 DSD filter, so it always outputs 705.6 kHz PCM from DSD64-DSD512.