Thanks for the input!
I was starting to get worried that DACs could be not that different.
I am a little curious, i am following this thread for quite some time, and i will stop following after i buy a chord hugo, until i am convinced i still have questions...
What sound was trying to be achieved when chord hugo was designed?.. i hhave read on more than one thread that there was a specific sound that was the ideal, so this is why hugo is so magical compared to all other DAPs...
What sound? None has always been the goal. Hugo has never been tweaked or voiced to sound a certain way. Now, the objective is to make it sound as musical as possible, so that when you listen to music, you become emotionally involved, otherwise why do it? Trouble is, how does one relate that goal into engineering? My view has always been to make the design as transparent as possible, that is for it to add no sound signature at all. Now if one listens to live un-amplified live music, there exists an enormous gulf between the sound of real instruments and high end audio reproduction, and if all the pieces in the chain were perfectly transparent, we would be unable to tell the difference between live and reproduced - and we would get that glorious sound of acoustic instruments all the time.
The problem is, nobody has ever heard what a transparent device would sound like - normally the term neutral really means the average sound of all the devices out there. So how does one design for transparency? One looks for distortions or aberrations that one can hear, then make improvements until those aberrations disappear. To make those aberrations disappear means careful, objective listening tests. But since nobody has heard the ideal device, there is no fixed reference to compare against. Additionally, when making design changes, one often changes something else as well. So its vital that careful listening tests are done, and in this case I am looking for changes in terms of variations. If one gets more variations in placement of instruments, we know for certain that transparency is better. If we get more variations in timbre (bright instruments brighter, rich instruments sounding smoother etc) then transparency is again better. If instrument separation is better, then it is more transparent. If the starting and stopping of notes are easier to perceive, then we know its better.
Now I have spent 30 years as a designer, when understanding why something made a difference to the sound, then reducing individual aberrations (to improve transparency) would result in a more musical sound - but this was an article of faith. But this was only proven when I first heard Hugo with all of its code, and frankly this experience is etched in my memory. It was a result of a 6 year upgrade in all the verilog modules that go into the FPGA, which individually was about reducing very small levels of errors. Hugo was the first design to get all of this upgrade, and when I first heard it, I was immensely surprised - where did that SQ come from? I knew it was going to sound better, but the major difference was the musicality - the way one could hear complex rhythms with ease, the timbre variations on each instrument, the way in which an individual sound could leap out from a recording - all this performance was unexpected, and it all contributes to Hugo's musicality. Hugo has a bizarre ability to tell you what is wrong about a recording - you easily hear master tape hiss, poor EQ, distortion on instruments etc - but it has this almost magical ability to communicate the musicality of the original recording. I listen a lot to BBC Radio 3, when they often play archive recordings - and you can hear the noise and distortion, but somehow you connect to the original music too.
Hugo was a project I designed simply for fun - I wanted something that would give me high-end SQ for when I was on planes or in hotel rooms as being a silicon audio chip consultant I spend a lot of time away. I never expected it would have such an affect in terms of musicality, nor had I expected the near universal acclaim that it has had. Indeed, in my wildest imagination I would have never dreamed that recording studios would be using Hugo to master recordings with.
So the article of faith - make no assumptions about what is audible or not and finding the myriad of distortions and aberrations, then scientifically reducing them, to me has paid off immensely in musical terms.
Rob
