[flyte3333]

@Em2016 , I may try one of those medical grade cables for my other systems (that doesn't require the minitoslink). Not a big fan of the adapters tbh.

Whoops, I forgot that the Analysis Plus medical grade doesn't come in a standard-to-mini TOSlink configuration.

I hope you enjoy the Lifatec ! I've been enjoying mine for a long while now.

 

[Soundsgoodtome]

I had the same thing going from my computer to the Hugo 2 using a cheap Sony optical cable, so I'd recommend trying USB. I agree with the comments above about using a high-quality optical cable.

Hi Currawong, good to see you post here. I actually was reading on your post back in I think 2009/2010 (I read it this morning though). You mentioned that you found Toslink either problematic or inferior, forgot the exact word you used, to coax in that post. Do you find that not true with newer DACs, including the Hugo2?

 

[maxh22]

I’ve been listening to a highly “pimped out” USB source with my Hugo2. My microRendu with ethernet isolated by fibre optics and powered by battery - so completely off the grid and ultra low noise USB audio output. As you would imagine it sounds great . It’s a warmer, smoother sound than my mains powered Macbook - I can’t be bothered unplugging my Macbook AND powered USB hub from mains power, plus my 13” Macbook is connected to a large mains powered LED monitor at all times at home.

But every few weeks I switch back to TOSlink and I’m always amazed at how dangerously great TOSlink is. By dangerous I mean dangerous to my ears because there’s a strange thing where I’m able to crank the volume louder but have LESS ear/brain fatigue than with USB. Not that I noticed ANY listening fatigue with my microRendu at all but for whatever reason it’s an easier listen for my ear/brain system when I switch to TOSlink. Again, I only notice when I switch to TOSlink - I’m never complaining about listening fatigue when listening with my microrendu.

At some point I’ll learn from my own lessons and just stick to TOSlink for good.

I get the same sensation you do when listening to toslink, when there is less RF noise it is easier on the ears and you can crank up the volume higher. Dangerously close is pretty right, I think you should try listening to the toslink for a few days then go back to the microrendu for a few days. You might come to an interesting conclusion

Just ordered a 3ft Lifatec MiniTos to Tos cable. Looking forward to putting it up against a cheap, but well regarded cable by MICCA cable.
https://www.amazon.com/Micca-Premium-Optical-Digital-Toslink/dp/B0088IBRJE

@Em2016 , I may try one of those medical grade cables for my other systems (that doesn't require the minitoslink). Not a big fan of the adapters tbh.

Cheers on the inputs!

Good choice on the Lifeatec it sounds great! Word of advice though, be careful when pulling out the optical cable out of the toslink socket, do not pull on the optisilk cable! Instead pull it out by holding onto the connectors. I messed mine up by pulling to hard on the sleeving which ending up exposing the interior of the optical cable. I have tried to tape it back together but now the sound quality is inconsistent, where before it was always excellent. I'm gonna have to order another one but hopefully I can save you and others from the same fate

 

[flyte3333]

Dangerously close is pretty right, I think you should try listening to the toslink for a few days then go back to the microrendu for a few days. You might come to an interesting conclusion

Hehe agreed. But as I mentioned I notice this after weeks of listening to my pimped out USB source (which is fantastic) and switching to TOSLink and it doesn't take long to appreciate this 'dangerously good' quality of TOSLink. So the conclusion has already been reached numerous times. Hopefully one of these days I'll learn from my own past repeatable conclusions and just stick with TOSLink hehe.

Word of advice though, be careful when pulling out the optical cable out of the toslink socket, do not pull on the optisilk cable! Instead pull it out by holding onto the connectors.

Good advice for pulling out any cables in general.

 

[Soundsgoodtome]

Word of advice though, be careful when pulling out the optical cable out of the toslink socket, do not pull on the optisilk cable! Instead pull it out by holding onto the connectors. I messed mine up by pulling to hard on the sleeving which ending up exposing the interior of the optical cable. I have tried to tape it back together but now the sound quality is inconsistent, where before it was always excellent. I'm gonna have to order another one but hopefully I can save you and others from the same fate

C'mon man, what do I look like some kind of amateur?! Lol, totally get you though. Working as a tech I see a lot of stuff come in with fangled connectors. I'm hoping I get more out of the Hugo 2 with it, it's already impressed the crap out of me so far with the Micca optical (had it for a week now).

 

[dontfeedphils]

I've only had the Hugo 2 for a couple days now, and I've used it exclusively with a Schiit Eitr and Black Dragon coax cable rather than USB, but I haven't noticed any hint of the harshness I've heard on the Mojo when using a bad USB source. I sold the Mojo to fund the upgrade, but I always disliked the Mojo and Utopia pairing because it sounded harsh and fatigued me. Then I decided to experiment with the Eitr and Mojo and it completely removed the fatiguing harshness that was driving my ears nuts before. Actually that's what sold me on the "Chord sound" and drove me to upgrade, glad I did.

 

[514077]

'xcuse me for waving the flag. But how about SysConcept optical cables. They're supposed to be great and at reasonable prices. If I used optical, I'd try them if only out of loyalty.

 

[maxh22]

C'mon man, what do I look like some kind of amateur?! Lol, totally get you though. Working as a tech I see a lot of stuff come in with fangled connectors. I'm hoping I get more out of the Hugo 2 with it, it's already impressed the crap out of me so far with the Micca optical (had it for a week now).

Hehe, I only mentioned it because the Lifeatec is simple to insert, but a PITA to remove once inserted. It's much easier for Mojo and Hugo 2 but with TT it requires a lot of swivel and general effort. The other toslink cables I have don't have his kind of problem, but also don't sound as good

 

[Currawong]

I use a Sysconcept now mainly.

Hi Currawong, good to see you post here. I actually was reading on your post back in I think 2009/2010 (I read it this morning though). You mentioned that you found Toslink either problematic or inferior, forgot the exact word you used, to coax in that post. Do you find that not true with newer DACs, including the Hugo2?

Modern DACs should be jitter immune, and Rob Watts has stated that the Hugo 2 is from memory. That initially made it puzzling that a cheap cable should affect it. The only possible reason I can think of for this is that, like USB, in the process of dealing with the jitter-heavy signal, the electronics of the Hugo 2 itself end up generating enough noise to cause distortion in the output.

 

[Paul Bjernklo]

'xcuse me for waving the flag. But how about SysConcept optical cables. They're supposed to be great and at reasonable prices. If I used optical, I'd try them if only out of loyalty.

I also have a Sysconcept toslink and I can recommend them as they support up to 24/192. As I understand they are not made from glass but somehow still manage it. I have thought about buying the Qed Quarts and/or Lifatec to compare (as some swear that glass is best) but have been too lazy to do yet. Has anyone compared any of these 3 cables as I would be interested in sound difference (if any...)

 

[Whazzzup]

I use a Sysconcept now mainly.



Modern DACs should be jitter immune, and Rob Watts has stated that the Hugo 2 is from memory. That initially made it puzzling that a cheap cable should affect it. The only possible reason I can think of for this is that, like USB, in the process of dealing with the jitter-heavy signal, the electronics of the Hugo 2 itself end up generating enough noise to cause distortion in the output.

I don’t know what’s going on in my set up no issues but look at blue Dave ferrite posts, I mean after spending tens of tho

 

[Rob Watts]

@Rob Watts what is your opinion on usb reclockers before Hugo 2. Benefit or not needed? Same question for Mojo. Source would be MacBook Pro usb-c

My experience is that more complex USB gear makes the sound brighter; this also applies to audiophile USB cables too; the technical explanation is that this increases RF noise, making noise floor modulation worse. And a small amount of noise floor modulation spices the sound up like MSG. So my advice is to keep the source bit perfect and as simple as possible; also your reference benchmark should be optical, and your target would be to get the USB to sound the same as optical - I have managed to do this with Hugo 2 on headphones with a large powerful MSI lap-top, which has USB and optical out. One of the targets with Hugo 2 was to close the SQ difference from these two inputs, and that I have done (even though I was not expecting them to sound identical!).

@Rob Watts

Hi Rob, I'm kind of curious about a few technical aspects about your DAC designs and have a few questions I've been thinking about:

1. What have you done to combat inter-sample peaks in your DACs?
2. I have read little snippets of the DAVE + Blu MK2 combo having high latency. Is this true? If so, how many milliseconds latency? The reason I ask is when M-Scalers are built-in even your budget level DACs (future Mojo?) and the technology will be available to more people. How will musicians use it or even gamers if there's noticable lag? I don't notice anything with my Hugo 2 but that only has a tap length of around 50k.
3. You have calculated that the DAVE + Blu MK2 combo has transient reproduction accuracy to 16-bits. Does this change as you use the digital volume control? For example, if one reduces the volume from 0dB to -12dB, does that reduce transient accuracy down to 14-bits?
4. Would you ever consider creating a more extreme version of your green Hugo 2 filter in the future? What I mean by that is, instead of a slight roll-off for higher sample rate content, how about complete elimination of content above say 22KHz a la brick wall? I say this as some external amplifiers have trouble with ultrasonic content and generate huge amounts of intermodular distortion. Plus the advantage of higher sample rates is the improvement in timing precision and not the ultrasonic garbage we can't hear.
5. I know that this has been brought up before and even I refuted it based on the system they used to measure the Hugo 2 with. But what do you make of the output impedance measurements and headphone load THD measurements posted here before? Does the Hugo 2 have feedback issues with demanding impedance swings?

I have one more question too regarding transient accuracy converted to bits. It's 2am right now and I'm half asleep, so I may not be thinking straight about this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But if the human hearing system has temporal acuity to as low as 4μS. If one converts that to arcseconds (I used an online calculator so may be wrong) that results in 0.00006 arcseconds. If one then converts that to degrees that results in 1.66666667e-8. This may be another crude conversion, but as there's only 360 degrees in 1 full turn, aka it's 100% you could sort of calculate a bit level out if it (every half is -3dB etc). 360 halved around 35 times would bring you close 1.66666667e-8. That's 105dB which is around 17.5-bits. If my calculations are correct (which I doubt, I have probably embarssed myself), could that mean a 4 million tap length filter would be the golden number?

Wow, lots of questions, I will try my best to answer.

1. Inter sample peaks never have been an issue as the first WTA filter has an embedded 2.75 dB overload margin; this ensures that inter-sample overloads will never happen.

2. Yes, the M scaler has about 630 milli-sec (0.63S) latency with 48k source, but it has a video mode where the latency is the same as Dave - 104 mS - which is normally OK using modern projectors and TV's (but set your source latency to 0)

3. OK the M scaler has the same as an ideal sinc function (which will perfectly recover the original bandwidth limited analogue signal) to 16.6 bits accuracy. So in effect this means that the interpolation under all conditions will not get any worse than 16.6 bits accuracy, and in practice would be better than this. I hope to have some measurements soon confirming the actual transient timing error. Now the volume control is after the WTA1, so volume has not impact on this.

4. Yes, in the case of HD recordings, there may be some small benefit in more filtering. But for regular 44.1, no I think that is unlikely. In fact, with 44.1k, the stopband attenuation is -135 dB, and most of the filtering is better than 150dB - so the WTA filter already effectively removes out of band images and noise.

5. No Hugo 2 certainly does not have issues with demanding impedance swings. Also, other measurements published either use test equipment that is not capable of measuring Hugo 2, or have applied methodology that fails to take into account the large latency of the WTA filters.

As to your final point - I am not sure your sums are right! 1 bit is a 6dB change. And perception measurements have detected a sensitivity of about 1 degree. Also, although 4uS is the limit to interaural delay, the ear/brain is actually much more sensitive to timing errors than just the 4uS - otherwise we could not hear the difference between the 16FS to 256FS WTA filter, as this works well below the 4uS limit. And there is more to timing errors than just the interaural delay, as these errors create more problems than just imaging (which is what interaural delay is used for - left right imagery), such as the perception of timbre, instrument separation and low frequency pitch.

 

[Ike1985]

Just wanted to say I am exceptionally pleased with my Hugo2. The sound quality streaming Bluetooth MP3's from bandcamp is exceptional and when running FLAC to it via UAPP it's out of this world. Pairing with A18 + M20 module. Great work, looking forward to the 2go.

 

[buzzlulu]

My experience is that more complex USB gear makes the sound brighter; this also applies to audiophile USB cables too; the technical explanation is that this increases RF noise, making noise floor modulation worse. And a small amount of noise floor modulation spices the sound up like MSG. So my advice is to keep the source bit perfect and as simple as possible; also your reference benchmark should be optical, and your target would be to get the USB to sound the same as optical - I have managed to do this with Hugo 2 on headphones with a large powerful MSI lap-top, which has USB and optical out. One of the targets with Hugo 2 was to close the SQ difference from these two inputs, and that I have done (even though I was not expecting them to sound identical!).

So is the idea to simply source from a computer (or whatever) using a generic USB cable........and allow the Hugo 2 to internally work its magic ?

 

[Ike1985]

So is the idea to simply source from a computer (or whatever) using a generic USB cable........and allow the Hugo 2 to internally work its magic ?

I use a cheap C to micro USB cable(it's a single cable no connector required) (search for homespot usb c to micro usb $5.99 amazon) and get exceptional sound quality. I prefer single cables, I don't like connectors. IMO the cable doing the digital processing should be the very last thing you look to upgrade-if at all (I'm not). I would upgrade the headphone cable before I'd ever upgrade any cable whose only purpose is sending 1's and 0's to H2.