[ALRAINBOW]

That read like a scrip from the matrix
That wizard guy with the beard and the pen
Are you one of the wakoski Brothers ?
Al

 

[elviscaprice]

  Good question. I'll sell my HD650s and buy headphones that would pair better with Hugo (I like Momentum more than HD650s with Hugo, the bass is simply amazing). Maybe Beyerdynamic T1/T5p/T90?

I have both the 650's and Audeze LCD X's.  No comparison, the X's blow away the 650's in my opinion.  Of course at 5 times the cost I paid for the 650's, the X's are in my opinion the go to headphones paired with the Hugo.  The detail and stage presentation are like being there, Live.
 
What I love about the Hugo is that in combination with quality cans such as the X's, you probably equal some of the best sound systems in any combination on the market today and all you need is two pieces along with your PC/existing play back device.
So for roughly 4K you've got reference sound second to none?  Simplicity and quality, two of my favorite objectives.

 

[GoSUV]

  i hope i will not get bashed here, but the chord hugo with shure se846 i think don't work well, I feel with the shure 846 that the mids and highs are bright and in most songs I need to turn down the volume, I tried the shure with ( fiio x5 and ifi ican nano) which seemed less bright and I can use the bass boost in ifi ican nano to add more punch in low ends.
 
I ordered more earbud tips maybe I have a seal issue.
 
But with audeze the hugo is amazing
 
of course the shure without hugo on iPod is not also amazing, maybe i am too sensitive in mid and highs area
 
i tried changing filters and using black filters but did not help 
 
one thing i wished for in hugo is adding a bass boost, as all eq in apps wither iOS or android are bad

If you have already tried the black filters on your SE846 and still found them too bright, then you have a fit/seal issue. I found the SE846's "memory wire" a hinderance as their rigidity will tend to pull the IEM's from my ear and breaking seal. If you have not adjusted them properly, the wires will cause the IEM's to unseat from your ears and break seal. Once you lose good seal, you lose bass. Try pressing on the IEM's to your ears lightly and hold them, and this should normally be how the IEM's would sound, provided you are using the right size tips and you are not pressing too hard to the point that the tip of the foams are squished shut. If you have an issue with the wires, replace them with a third party one.
 
Download one of the test tones that only have bass frequency, and try to see if you are achieving good seal with your IEM's. Without good seal and thus the right amount of bass, it is pointless to judge your other sources and components in the chain.

 

[Crashem]

Lightharmonic's davinci use R2R for PCM.
It's said in the product page(http://www.lightharmonic.com/davinci.html).

Yeah I saw that. Looks like they have a custom ladder dac. Sure seems like a lot of the super high end dacs are avoiding delta sigma designs. Msb I know uses a custom designed one as well. I'm pretty sure my lamp is using some nos ladder dac. It's very interesting to see r2r dacs make a comeback after absolute dominance of delta sigma dacs even in the audiophile world.

 

[ALRAINBOW]

What lampi do you have ??

 

[Crashem]

What lampi do you have ??

L5

 

[ALRAINBOW]

Great DAC man. I had a l5 at my office and I just got my big 7 a week or two ago. What DAC man. Maybe it's why we feel like we do about the hugo .
If you want upgraded tubes I have avoid source if you need one .

Al

 

[Crashem]

Great DAC man. I had a l5 at my office and I just got my big 7 a week or two ago. What DAC man. Maybe it's why we feel like we do about the hugo .
If you want upgraded tubes I have avoid source if you need one .

Al

Cough. PM me. Don't want to derail thread. But my L5 uses 6sn7 and 6x5. Love to hear about your source. Got a bunch of decent tubes but looking for nirvana here. Maybe comment in lampi thread.

 

[SearchOfSub]

I actually can afford a Big 6 right now with volume control but I do not want to skimp on preamp. So I must go Hugo =>Job Pre2 => Job 225 => EA Micro Ones.

All considered giant killer for the price range

 

[rgs9200m]

Well, I broke down and bought a couple of DSD downloads from Acoustic Sounds to hear Hirez on the Hugo, and it's pretty darn amazing, especially the Carpenters one (along with the Boston one) using both TH900s and PM-1s. Give it a try if you find some music there you like.
(This is shown in Jriver as 5.6448 mhz [double-speed dsd] just to confirm.) This Carpenters album is really mesmerizing; listening as I type here.)
DSD is off-the-charts-good here, with controlled bass, natural everything, no fatigue, and I think basically as good as a top SACD player, though I need to do some more listening to compare.

 

[estreeter]

  i hope i will not get bashed here, but the chord hugo with shure se846 i think don't work well, I feel with the shure 846 that the mids and highs are bright and in most songs I need to turn down the volume, I tried the shure with ( fiio x5 and ifi ican nano) which seemed less bright and I can use the bass boost in ifi ican nano to add more punch in low ends.
 
I ordered more earbud tips maybe I have a seal issue.
 
But with audeze the hugo is amazing
 
of course the shure without hugo on iPod is not also amazing, maybe i am too sensitive in mid and highs area
 
i tried changing filters and using black filters but did not help 
 
one thing i wished for in hugo is adding a bass boost, as all eq in apps wither iOS or android are bad

 
That last statement has me wondering if you understand the difference between a DAC and a DAP although I will concede that the addition of very subtle crossfeed settings may have some confused. The Digizoid ZO2 is the only device I've encountered that allows users to mess with the bass boost and its a gimmicky toy compared to the Hugo. We've been gifted a Porsche with a Toyota sticker price and you're telling me you'd prefer it if it had a pair of subwoofers in the trunk ?  Rob wasnt contracted to pimp anyone's ride  

 

[Rob Watts]

  Hello,
Perhaps Rob or others who understand this point can chip in and enlighten me.
 
I understand the claim that people hear down to 4 micro seconds resolution of audio but don't get how the Hugo can reconstruct the sounds form a 22 micro second sample? if a sound started and ended in between those 22 micro seconds - than we have no 'evidence' it ever existed, no?
 
I like the Hugo, but a bit puzzled.
 
Thanks!

Good question. Every time I talk about sampling, I specifically say that the interpolation filter, with an infinite number of taps, will perfectly (that is, completely perfectly, it will be the same signal just time shifted) reconstruct the original bandwidth limited input signal. Now this bandwidth limited signal must have no output at all above the Nyquist frequency. So the interpolation is not trying to re-create information that is not already present at the point of sampling - but if you use an infinite tap length interpolation filter you will reconstruct the original bandwidth limited signal perfectly - so this means you have effectively not sampled the signal, and filled out the in-between data perfectly.
 
So in your case, you put a signal that has information only above the Nyquist frequency (say a 30 kHz tone) and you are sampling at 44.1k. Now you put this signal through a brick wall filter set to infinite attenuation above 22.05k, that will mean the output of the filter is zero. You then sample zero, the perfect interpolation then re-creates - zero, exactly as it should do. Now the point I am trying to make is if you have a finite tap length filter, then when it re-constructs the bandwidth limited signal, there will be timing errors in the reconstruction process, and these timing errors are significant. To illustrate this, imagine a 20 kHz tone burst. So the signal is zero, then it is full output (and yes in reality it would not be this way as it would have pre-ringing due to the brick wall filter but ignore this as I am trying to illustrate a point). Now if we happen to sample at the peaks, then we will get a full output, followed by a declining output. If we sample at the point it is zero, then we lose the missing transient, and the signal then builds up so that at a few hundred uS later we get peak output. Now lets take the worst case, a FIR filter with a tap length of 1, (it returns the data unchanged so no filtering) then we can see that the transient timing error is hundreds of uS. Now if we use an infinite tap length filter, then it will reconstruct the output of the brick wall filter perfectly, zero timing errors, it would be as if we had not sampled the data at all. My point of view was that conventional filters, with limited taps of a hundred or so, would create time domain errors that would be audible.
 
Now I use the 4uS inter-aural delay as an illustration of the importance of timing to the ear/brain. I have no idea what levels of timing errors are significant - that is a 4uS error of -60 dB, or is it -80dB - or indeed whether its 4uS or 4nS - after all, if I gave you a DAC that had 4uS of timing error you would say that may be a problem - but if I then said 4uS of jitter (timing error is the same as jitter), then you would be horrified, that must be audible as people keep going on about femto clocks within DAC's...
 
So my approach has been very simple - to recognise that the FIR filter tap length is important for reconstructing the timing of transients, and to keep increasing the tap length until I can no longer hear any improvement, and secondly that the FIR interpolation algorithm itself has to be optimized to improve timing and maximize sound quality with a finite number of taps.
 
So in short, an infinite tap length filter will perfectly re-create the bandwidth limited signal, as if no sampling had taken place. It absolutely will not recreate the signal before the brick wall input filter - but my listening tests has shown that linear phase brick-wall filters are completely transparent anyway, if you do them correctly. The sound quality problem is not the initial brick wall filter, but the interpolation reconstruction filter. That's why red-book sounds so good with Hugo...    
 
Hope this explains,
 
Rob   

 

[estreeter]

 
I have both the 650's and Audeze LCD X's.  No comparison, the X's blow away the 650's in my opinion.  Of course at 5 times the cost I paid for the 650's, the X's are in my opinion the go to headphones paired with the Hugo.  The detail and stage presentation are like being there, Live.
 
What I love about the Hugo is that in combination with quality cans such as the X's, you probably equal some of the best sound systems in any combination on the market today and all you need is two pieces along with your PC/existing play back device.
So for roughly 4K you've got reference sound second to none?  Simplicity and quality, two of my favorite objectives.

 
Second to none ? I'd like to hear the other contenders before I make a statement like that and - yes - I do own both the Hugo and the LCD-X and I'm all for simplicity and quality. Rotel have a new desktop DAC out for around 800USD that the TAS reviewer claimed will 'compete with DACs 2 and 3 times the price' - that puts it squarely in the crosshairs of the Hugo. When professional reviewers - and I'm assuming TAS still pays for published reviews - still stagger headfirst into the old 'competes with products 2-3 times the price' cliche, we have to ask ourselves where that will end. I'd dearly love to hear BAD's current reference DAC, the Alpha2, regardless of the sticker. I've heard the Weiss DAC202 with my Taurus into the LCD-X and the combination was mind-blowing, from nothing more than the Firewire port on an iMac running vanilla iTunes - I'm not prepared to dismiss the more expensive gear simply because I havent heard it. 
 
http://www.berkeleyaudiodesign.com/products3.html

 

[elviscaprice]

   
Second to none ? I'd like to hear the other contenders before I make a statement like that and - yes - I do own both the Hugo and the LCD-X and I'm all for simplicity and quality. Rotel have a new desktop DAC out for around 800USD that the TAS reviewer claimed will 'compete with DACs 2 and 3 times the price' - that puts it squarely in the crosshairs of the Hugo. When professional reviewers - and I'm assuming TAS still pays for published reviews - still stagger headfirst into the old 'competes with products 2-3 times the price' cliche, we have to ask ourselves where that will end. I'd dearly love to hear BAD's current reference DAC, the Alpha2, regardless of the sticker. I've heard the Weiss DAC202 with my Taurus into the LCD-X and the combination was mind-blowing, from nothing more than the Firewire port on an iMac running vanilla iTunes - I'm not prepared to dismiss the more expensive gear simply because I havent heard it. 
 
http://www.berkeleyaudiodesign.com/products3.html

 (Note the question mark to that statement, second to none)  Not I, I don't need to hear the others    I'm overly happy with the sound I've achieved with what I've got.  Some folks are forever in chase of the next best thing and never content.  Some just want to hear music at a very high level with what they found on the market today, not tomorrow, and that's their second to none.  Time for some quality listening.

 

[obsidyen]

 
I have both the 650's and Audeze LCD X's.  No comparison, the X's blow away the 650's in my opinion.  Of course at 5 times the cost I paid for the 650's, the X's are in my opinion the go to headphones paired with the Hugo.  The detail and stage presentation are like being there, Live.
 
What I love about the Hugo is that in combination with quality cans such as the X's, you probably equal some of the best sound systems in any combination on the market today and all you need is two pieces along with your PC/existing play back device.
So for roughly 4K you've got reference sound second to none?  Simplicity and quality, two of my favorite objectives.

I see. I've heard they're good but they're not sold in my country. Besides, people say they are big and heavy, might be big for my head.