In answer to people’s questions about the differences between the mk1 & mk2 Chord Hugo I have a few answers that should appease peoples surmises…
There has been only one production change to Hugo’s production board assembly, this came after the first batch of assembled boards were used up in manufacturing. The case design modifications allowed Chord to make minor changes inside, they could now could cut in a new printed modified circuit board.
The changes were minor and mostly mechanical, one of which was the tooling of the red/ black RCAs block (hence different RCA colours)… The only electrical modification was to increase the playing time of Hugo by about an hour when the HD USB input is not being used, this was achieved by switching off all the high data rate USB circuitry, FPGA's etc when it's not in use.
This modification carried out by the team at Chord can never be retrofitted to the first Hugo unit, that said… it has been included on all units built onwards from the first week of April.
Note: there were no measurable sonic advantages whatsoever that Chord could detect from this USB modification.
A note from my Chord contact…
The team at Chord perhaps, unlike some, are generally reluctant to publish something we can't really measure and put it over as a significant sonic improvement.
Even though if over time a person or two can discern a slight difference that is all to the benefit of the product this is because when a design change is made and tested it's to a very limited number of lab samples. When this modification went into the product this part of the design could certainly not have been implemented into the first thousand units as it had not been proven at the time of launch. Indeed one part of it had not even been considered or designed at that time… ends