[joshuachew]

   
But thankful for the price point. Some people would pay more, but a lot won't. What they should do is remove BT. 

 
You bought the Hugos from the CustomCable sale?

 

[SoundFreaq]

The whole BT thing is like if Mercedes-Benz working really hard to bring out a sport-luxury, S-class, with unheard-of features, easily valued over $100K, but they sell it at $30K instead. But to top it off, they throw in spill-proof cup holders, that no one else has, for free, and you walk away from the whole deal complaining the cup holders don't hold bottles of Dom Perignon. 

 

[SoundFreaq]

   
You bought the Hugos from the CustomCable sale?

 
Yes. At that time, they had no restriction on the sale, and honestly should honor it. They now added an inventory counter. 4 left!

 

[OK-Guy]

OK-Guy, they're having a sale. I think the correction, if any, will come in a few weeks when the novelty wears off and Hugo owners decide if they want to live with it permanently.

 
nothing new , many sell things on via Head-Fi... someone sold his ZX1 a day after it was released.
 
There really is no 'novelty' value... you either like a product or you don't it really is that simple... economics of what Head-Fi can dictate to the outside market really doesn't enter the equation, otherwise Sony would drop its price in the UK for the ZX1 because it's cheaper for  Head-Fi'ers to save £80 by buying from Japan.... you may or may not see the analogy here.

 

[woodcans]

OK-Guy, they're having a sale. I think the correction, if any, will come in a few weeks when the novelty wears off and Hugo owners decide if they want to live with it permanently.

 
True with anything on HF. I recently had my Hugo up for sale, in part b/c of little use due to work, etc. blah blah blah. But after a few prolonged listening sessions this week, I yanked that listing in a hurry.

 

[weisse muller]

Are there any other chassis? What's original chassis?

The first batches of the production units had smaller RCA accesses there are now plenty of cables that fit these. From the chord cable co and moon audio being two of them.

 

[kantana]

The first batches of the production units had smaller RCA accesses there are now plenty of cables that fit these. From the chord cable co and moon audio being two of them.

Anyone have any ideas on the batch numbers and the chassis mods they made?  Eg when I connect to my Hugo via BT I can see it's named HUGO6xx, on my dealers Hugo it was a HUGO3xx.  Anyone know if each Hugo has it's own xxx number or is that the firmware number perhaps?

 

[Diavel]

  They also have a blurb at the bottom that states they can ship to US. Despite the new statement. 
 
In my opinion, the BT "problems" are a non-issue. It's not vital to the function in any way, nor is it even an optimum method for listening from a quality viewpoint. Pure convenience. I would still have bought it at original price, and still maintain it's a good value sans BT. 
 
Pretend it's not on there, then it becomes more like every other device, but sounds better. 

Totally agree, BT output hardly worth mentioning from quality perspective surely!

 

[kantana]

  Totally agree, BT output hardly worth mentioning from quality perspective surely!

BT is there for convenience to pair up with a source wirelessly when moving around for example.  It is also part of the original design and the fact it supports aptX and has a huge sticker on the bottom with aptX on it.  I won't be using BT much since quality is not as good as from the other inputs but when carrying it around and listening there's no better solution if I need to use my mobile phone at the same time and don't want to wrestle with wires.  I may only clock up 1% use with BT but I would at least like that use to be satisfactory and no worse than any other alternate BT product.

 

[podeschi]

The whole BT thing is like if Mercedes-Benz working really hard to bring out a sport-luxury, S-class, with unheard-of features, easily valued over $100K, but they sell it at $30K instead. But to top it off, they throw in spill-proof cup holders, that no one else has, for free, and you walk away from the whole deal complaining the cup holders don't hold bottles of Dom Perignon. 

Great post.

 

[SoundFreaq]

 
BT is there for convenience to pair up with a source wirelessly when moving around for example.  It is also part of the original design and the fact it supports aptX and has a huge sticker on the bottom with aptX on it.  I won't be using BT much since quality is not as good as from the other inputs but when carrying it around and listening there's no better solution if I need to use my mobile phone at the same time and don't want to wrestle with wires.  I may only clock up 1% use with BT but I would at least like that use to be satisfactory and no worse than any other alternate BT product.

 
There is no alternate product. An alternative would imply a similar quality/feature set.

 

[asiano]

  I think you have mis-understood him, HUGO supports DSD natively and when he says feed the desktop via RCA he meant use the RCA out of HUGO to connect it to an external desktop amp and test whether you get the same issue (assuming the amp use has silent background).

I know that the Hugo accepts DSD natively as an input.  What I wanted to know was whether it converts DSD to PCM during its processing or keeps it as DSD the entire time until its converted to analog for output.
 
I plan on using the Hugo for both portable and home use in my main system.

 

[SleepyOne]

It uses DoP via either USB or Coaxial. 

 

[SoundFreaq]

  I know that the Hugo accepts DSD natively as an input.  What I wanted to know was whether it converts DSD to PCM during its processing or keeps it as DSD the entire time until its converted to analog for output.
 
I plan on using the Hugo for both portable and home use in my main system.

 
Here ya go. 
 

  Hmm. Not an easy question to answer. Firstly an explanation of the pros/cons of the formats:
 
1. PCM Pro: excellent resolution of small signals, very small signals do not disappear into the dithered noise floor.
    Cons: Timing. Ear/brain can resolve 4uS, CD innately is at 22uS.
2. DSD Pro: Samples at 0.34 uS, albeit at not very good resolution, so has much better timing innately
    Cons: resolution. Noise shaper noise is not the same as dithered noise, any signal below noise shaper noise floor is lost.
 
Now the timing issue can be resolved by the DAC interpolation filter, and with an infinite tap length filter, timing is completely reconstructed. So red-book is capable of very much better performance, if you improve the interpolation filter. But with DSD, the encoding means that low-level details are lost in the noise shaper noise floor, and they are lost forever. So DSD has a compression in depth and instrument separation, due to poor resolution, but does not innately have timing problems. Check out 2L website, and compare the DXD recording to the DSD64 or DSD128 - to my ears, the loss in transparency of DSD is not small.
 
Getting back to design of the DAC. Now I run my DAC's with a very simple single stage active analogue section, with only 2 caps and 2 resistors in the direct signal path - and I do this for transparency. But this means the digital RF noise in the 100k to 1M band must be very low, so the digital source must be filtered - and DSD is at -20dBFS at 100kHz. So I can't put raw DSD into the DAC, or it will sound very hard. So the DSD is filtered, which converts it to regular PCM.
 
If I were doing a DAC for only DSD would I do it this way? Yes, I think I would, as simple analogue is always the best.
 
Incidentally, the DSD filters on Hugo has been improved - they are much smoother than with Qute.
 

 

  Yes. But.. I have heard awful DSD's compared to regular PCM, and awful PCM compared to DSD. So if the recording started as DSD, stick to DSD and vice versa.
 
The 2L website does allow us to hear DXD (352.8 kHz PCM the DSD master tape if you like) against DSD, and you can hear the losses that DSD gives. And if I were not using a DAC with a WTA filter, I guess I would prefer DSD every time. So like most things in life, it all depends! 
 

 

[bmichels]

8:20 hours Battery.  Is it OK or not enough ?  I wonder because I read something like 12 hours run-time for the HUGO !? 

 
I did a battery test today, with a mix of ALAC 14/44 & 24/96: Blue turned Green after 2:30h, and.... after 8 hours, the led started blinking RED, and 20 minutes later the Hugo muted.