[supervisor]

Dear Rob, I'm having problems with my recently purchased Hugo2 and thought maybe you can help me.
It seemed fine at first. But all of a sudden (after two weeks), I begin to hear loud crackling and pop sounds. The kind you hear when a vinyl record is really dirty. The sound is almost louder than the music itself. At one point, the music even got lower and cut out all together replaced by hissing and cracking. Again, even when the headphone is removed from my head and ears, I can still hear it through the headphone.
I first assumed it was the external amp or surge protector (or power outlet) or even my computer so I disconnected everything but the headphone. But the Hugo 2 still kept crackling and popping. I tried several headphones just to make sure, and crackling and popping continued. I know it's not the iphone or other wireless devices, because I know what they can sound like. It is not this kind of sound and at this level of loudness and does not continue or last this long.
I explained this to the dealer and the dealer explained it to Chord (that is the dealer forwarded my email to them). All Chord said was that they have not heard this happening.
It's been about a week since the problem started. At first the crackling and popping grew worse but now it happens less frequently. But it's still happening.
So I'm wanting to have my Hugo 2 replaced for repaired but there seems to be no action from my dealer or Chord. Any suggestions Rob? Many thanks.

what is your source? there's a current bug with Tidal desktop in Exclusive Mode that would sound like what you're describing. try turning off Exclusive Mode if this fits your description.

 

[sling5s]

Not using Tidal. Tried both Amarra 4 and Audirvana Plus with my own music. My problems when not connected to source.

 

[Dvdlucena]

 

[musickid]

i'm starting to believe that reported differences in SQ between different high end dacs is purely subjective in some instances and is non dependent on the advanced technological status a dac has within its market place. another way of putting it is that an individual's preference is not always linked to the dac's real capability but on personal taste. so a 10k dac may sound worse to some people compared to a 100 pound dac. if even 50 percent of this true how then can you trust personal reviews on headfi? the only thing i can imagine is to go with the majority? dvdlucena has expressed preference for yggy vs h2 whereas a number of people before expressed a preference for h2 vs yggy. i wonder what is going on deep in an individuals psyche and receptors to cause this phenomena? its more complicated than simply putting it down to personal preference for sure. with visual processing it seems to be far more black and white. just some thoughts but it makes you think. you can trust your own ears ultimately i suppose which is why i went for H2.

 

[Peter Hyatt]

No by archive recordings I mean 1930's mono, which are transcribed from gramophone recordings. I would not have been able to listen to these pre-Hugo as the distortion and noise would have been too bad. But since Hugo, you can actually enjoy them as they sound like real instruments playing, but with poor eq and distortion and noise over the top of the sound of a real instrument. Before they would just sound distorted and noisy and not real.

Decca hit their prime from about 1960 to 1967 - and after 1967 they started recording with Dolby. After 1967 the recordings are fine, but sound nowhere near as real as before; for example kettle drums are just one big loose heavy bass thump; there is none of the character or timbre of a real kettle drum, which you get with the earlier recordings. But of course you get master tape noise, but I do not care about that.

The second benefit is the Decca box sets are currently not re-mastered, and this I think is a huge benefit. Modern ADC's are good in terms of distortion and noise, but the chip designers have forgotten their basic digital sampling theory in that they allow unacceptable levels of aliasing as they all use cheap half-band filters. This means that large amounts of aliasing occurs. The usual argument is the aliasing is from 18 to 22.05 kHz, and so it's inaudible - but it certainly is not inaudible, as the aliasing degrades the timing of transients accuracy. Earlier ADC's used passive components, and although these degraded transparency, I suspect they had much better aliasing performance.

Of course some of the magic is down to simplicity of both mic technique and simple tuned electronics, but it's not all down to that . Mercury Living Presence current box sets do not sound anywhere near as good as Decca, and these recordings are simple too. But they have been re-mastered, and the older CD versions sound much better.

It goes without saying that the Davina project (my ADC) will have none of the above shortcomings; absolutely no aliasing, and a very simple connection from Mic to the ADC to maximize transparency.

Rob

Rob,

can you specify which 30's discs you are enjoying with Hugo 2?

I am a fan of 30's music but the recordings are very rough (mostly compilations done since 2000 such as 'songs of the 1930s') which sound fairly rough. Any directions on where to land some good recordings would be great. Besides the old acoustic blues, I love some of the movie tunes from the 30's, early Bing Crosby, and so on.


Also, if you can address which filters you use, and when, it would be both helpful and interesting for discussion.

Thanks!

 

[x RELIC x]

dvdlucena has expressed preference for yggy vs h2

He prefers Yggy to the original Hugo. He may prefer the Yggy to the Hugo 2, or vice versa. There's no right or wrong with preferences.

Hope hugo 2 is equal or better than Yggdrasil

 

[Currawong]

Jus my impressions, but I had a hugo 1 and stayed 40 days in a friend's house that had a Yggdrasil with gsxmk2. So I could compare both system with his speakers and headphones, just changing the dac. Man, Yggdrasil was in a complete different league. I almost cry traveling back home with my hugo. Hope hugo 2 is equal or better than Yggdrasil

That's why I bought my Yggy in the first place. I still use the Hugo in the family room with a pair of Emotivas (and the Wyrd) as it is very satisfying to listen with still.

i'm starting to believe that reported differences in SQ between different high end dacs is purely subjective in some instances and is non dependent on the advanced technological status a dac has within its market place. another way of putting it is that an individual's preference is not always linked to the dac's real capability but on personal taste. so a 10k dac may sound worse to some people compared to a 100 pound dac. if even 50 percent of this true how then can you trust personal reviews on headfi? the only thing i can imagine is to go with the majority? dvdlucena has expressed preference for yggy vs h2 whereas a number of people before expressed a preference for h2 vs yggy. i wonder what is going on deep in an individuals psyche and receptors to cause this phenomena? its more complicated than simply putting it down to personal preference for sure. with visual processing it seems to be far more black and white. just some thoughts but it makes you think. you can trust your own ears ultimately i suppose which is why i went for H2.

Likely a number of factors. Mainly the context of any impressions. For example, some people love the Tera Player, but it is very mid-forward which, combined with non-oversampling distortion, probably sounds very pleasant in some ways even if it is extremely flawed. Some of it is probably the system being used. I found that to be an issue with the DAVE, where plugging it into an amp you lose some of it's "magic". Considering that the Yggdrasil needs to be used with an amp, and the Hugo 2 doesn't, that will affect impressions if comparing them. That's what I've found with the Hugo 2 as well. Even A/Bing the same part of a high quality acoustic recording (through the Master 9 or Solaris) listening for subtleties in the decay of notes, it was pretty close. Relaxing and listening, my impression is that I feel the music more with the Hugo 2. That's pretty impossible to quantify. I wonder if I was using the streamer again as the source, and only AES or S/PDIF inputs, would my impressions be any different? What if I had a big speaker rig instead? And so on...

 

[cyberhazy]

Mercury Living Presence current box sets do not sound anywhere near as good as Decca, and these recordings are simple too. But they have been re-mastered, and the older CD versions sound much better.

Rob

The Mercury Living Presence 50-CD box sets (Vol. 1 through 3) are a repackaging of the older CD releases from the 1990s. I have a few dozen of these original CDs; the box sets have the same musical pairings, same sound, same data. As the box sets were assembled somewhat as a tribute to original engineering team Bob Fine and Wilma Cozart, it makes sense that the producers skipped over the later third-party remasters used for the SACD and "high-res" reissues, and reused the original analog-tape-to-digital transfers which were overseen by Wilma Cozart Fine in the 1990s. And I'm glad to report that these older transfers really come alive on my Hugo2! They're really quite exciting and involving; the opposite of warm, flat, and smoothed over. (And at $2 to $3 per disk, the only drawback is the time needed to rip and tag 150 CDs.)

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the RCA Living Stereo classical box set. Legendary performances, but employing "modern" DSD remastering. (Why, Sony, why?)

 

[tunes]

If you are sending a digital signal, which you must to the Hugo2, then you aren't using the DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) in the MBP. If it's an older MBP you can output a digital signal from the 3.5mm optical port or USB.

If you'd like to bypass Apple's Core Audio processing before passing on the digital data (PCM or DSD) you can look at software like Audirvana+ (there's others, I just Audirvana), which also has the benefit of automatically sending the proper sampling rate without any re-sampling (bit perfect).

I already have a software product called VOX that can play FLAC files on a MBP and I plugged in a optical cable with 2.5 mm male jack and there is res light coming out the other end so I assume my MBP uses the headphone jack as dual purpose analogue and digital optical out via Toslink. How do I know if VOX is sendinding bit perfect data to my Hugo2?

 

[rkt31]

yggy and Hugo 1 both are different tech. yggy uses ladder chip with oversampling by a readymade chip. Hugo does not use readymade chip but uses proprietary algorithm for oversampling using much higher processing power of FPGAs . I can't find any reason why yggy should sound better than even mojo let alone Hugo 1. though I have not heard yggy but I feel hugo's real test is a well set up speaker system directly feeding to a power amp or even a good passive/transformer pre. in my set up feeding Hugo directly to power amp Hugo has an astounding sense of depth and height.

 

[HanyTheo]

Why you say that? Even Rob once said that 2Qute have all the potentialities tô outcast hugo 1.

But it doesnt to me. It is trying to sound fuller but taking out a lot of the details like mojo. 2q soubds like an improved mojo to me. Not hugo

 

[Rob Watts]

Rob,

can you specify which 30's discs you are enjoying with Hugo 2?

I am a fan of 30's music but the recordings are very rough (mostly compilations done since 2000 such as 'songs of the 1930s') which sound fairly rough. Any directions on where to land some good recordings would be great. Besides the old acoustic blues, I love some of the movie tunes from the 30's, early Bing Crosby, and so on.


Also, if you can address which filters you use, and when, it would be both helpful and interesting for discussion.

Thanks!

I stick with green on the filter. I had expected to actually use it on the fly, but in practice don't.

As to archive recordings I don't have many - a few piano pieces. I noticed the effect when listening to Radio 3, which occasionally has exceptional performances from archive recordings. I mention it because it was really odd; in the past, with all my nearly 40 years of designing and playing with audio, it goes against the drift - better audio equated with not being able to enjoy poorer quality recordings. With Hugo 1 that trend reversed big time. I realised that actually digital had very serious problems that was stopping me enjoying music; with Hugo 1 I had actually made enough progress so that these issues had been improved enough so that I could now enjoy low quality recordings. Indeed I feel very fortunate in that I have hit my personal holy grail - in that finally it's the music performance that most matters, not my gear.

I must stress that this is my personal opinion, and others may not experience the same. We all respond differently to audio. And following on from other posts, some people actually like the sound of distortion, and in my opinion have very odd ideas of what constitutes good sound. This of course makes it difficult as a reader to differentiate peoples tastes; but as a rule of thumb if somebody simply posts that something is in a different league than something else then ignore it. If they can characterise what is different in a detailed and definitive fashion then that post you can't afford to ignore and it will give a better handle as to where they are coming from.

At the end of the day, let your own ears, and more importantly your emotions to the music be the final judge; it's only being able to enjoy the music that counts.

 

[x RELIC x]

I already have a software product called VOX that can play FLAC files on a MBP and I plugged in a optical cable with 2.5 mm male jack and there is res light coming out the other end so I assume my MBP uses the headphone jack as dual purpose analogue and digital optical out via Toslink. How do I know if VOX is sendinding bit perfect data to my Hugo2?

Yes, then it has a 3.5mm optical out like my MBP. Apple later dropped this feature. Look at the sampling rate indicator on the Hugo2 and if it corresponds to the sampling rate of the music file then it is playing bit-perfect without the software re-sampling it. I don't use VOX but also check your preferences, or any other options that may be adding effects or 'treatment' to the audio and turn them off if you want it to just pass the data along to the Hugo2.

 

[audi0nick128]

Hey there,
just ordered some goodies for my Hugo2
The black leather VALENTINUM case, will ship today

Wonder if this ancient Ipod is compatible with H2

And I ordered a Triton Audio Neolev as a base for stationary listening... Hope to receive the base on Monday.

Will report back and upload pics of H2 inside the case.

Cheers

 

[Peter Hyatt]

Jus my impressions, but I had a hugo 1 and stayed 40 days in a friend's house that had a Yggdrasil with gsxmk2. So I could compare both system with his speakers and headphones, just changing the dac. Man, Yggdrasil was in a complete different league. I almost cry traveling back home with my hugo. Hope hugo 2 is equal or better than Yggdrasil

Good thing you didn't overstay your welcome.

So touching that Hugo almost made you cry.