After 98 pages, not many impressions of the Hugo 2. I'm still in the fence on getting this dac. I love the form factor and portability of unit, but I do wonder if it can compete with the Schiit Yggy at around 2.2k. 2.2k is a steep price and yes it comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but sq matters at the end of the day. I have my Sony WM1A for portability, so looking for a desktop unit.
Is there a good ab comparison with the Yggdrasil?
TBH, I heard it at Canjam NYC, and I wasn't floored by the performance. I owned a mojo for almost a year, so I was expecting a revelation for the price difference. Yes there is better treble performance, no cramped soundstage, and better timbre. It was not an ideal setting and I only listened to it for 10 minutes with Zeus XRs and andromedas. I'll have to listen again in a better environment.
Something about the house sound still feels a bit strange to me. I don't want to hear Jazz repeat the same thing he repeats a million times in every chord forum so that's not what I'm looking to hear. I know the Chord viewpoints and explanations already.
I hear the WTA filter in action and it creates this weird strobe like feeling....like very small micro grains in the sound(Can feel it as Rob Watts himself says we are very sensitive to timing). This makes the sound thinner(or I guess "live" for some people) ultra clean. The lower resonances sound a tad strange. I can describe it like stuff cotton in your bass ports of your speakers to try to create a neutral sound. At the same time the sound is fluffy, smooth. The sound is very detailed but neither viseral, nor sharp, and tries to exude effortlessness. Imaging is good, but again I can't really tell if its trying to be 2d or 3d because the timbre of the sound tries to sound flat(I guess people can call it neutral or reference, but it doesn't sound like that in real life). its really strange(something I got from chord mojo having an X shaped soundstage instead of an O). It just sounded inoffensive, ambivalent, passive aggressive, slightly diffuse.
TBH I couldn't hear the 1k worth of performance increase over my wm1a.
Still probably one of the better dacs I heard there, but I can say that all the hype on most audio gear is overblown here at head-fi. I took my time to listen to all the products at canjam, and compared them to the impressions in the thread. Its far overblown and the differences are much smaller.
I did not get to hear the dave, because it was being used, but I did try the Hugo TT. Really wasn't impressed at all. I can't believe people payed 5k for that, when it came out. its nowhere close to the performance of a yggy/ragnorak stack with the utopias. I wish people did a blind test to see which dac they prefer, because I think after hearing things like 10 pulse arrays and 50k taps, and all the stuff said here, one can imagine the difference. If someone asked me to listen to the Hugo TT blindly, and asked me how much do you think that setup is worth......I'm sorry to say, but I wouldn't guess its 4-5k. Same goes with the Hugo 2. If I heard it blind, I couldn't say at this point its worth 2.2k. (same goes with WM1Z....overpriced walkman....that's def not 3k sound and blame AK for that).
Looking forward to other impressions.....who are more on a neutral note with chord gear.
