some of the reviews preferring Hugo TT2 to Dave here are indeed a bit puzzling to me.
Before buying my Dave I went through every single post of Rob Watts on Head fi, multiple times to make sure I understood.why Dave was better than Hugo 1 as the price jump was massive.
By the way all it took was a 1 small audition listening to Dave vs Hugo TT1 to hear the superiority of Dave. Also this was confimed when testing Blu2/Qutest vs Dave alone, I could hear what Blu2 was adding to Qutest, but I still preferred Dave alone.
Digital sources in particular are of great interest to me because I can hear (before the Hugo was created) problems that they have playing music, or even just playing a recording of a single voice of a person reading the news. before Hugo it just did not sound real enough to my ears.
And the primary difference of Dave over the Hugo range, to my understanding isn't only the output stage or the power supply.
It is the much larger FGPA and programming which went into it. which allows the 20 element pulse aray to have a noise shaper of -350 DB. What this really means is that Dave has superb small signal resolution and refinement which the Hugo range doesn't.
The additional power of the Hugo TT2 cannot overcome it's considerably smaller FPGA and less elaborate programming.
My humble opinion.
Less elaborate programming could actually be a benefit rather than a hinderance and downgrade.
It’s called optimization. Cleaning up code can actually improve things, help get the best out of the hardware involved and in the process make whatever device better overall. It can also give a much better user experience.
Robs code has no doubt continued to evolve since daves release, refinements here and there, possibly his code is leaner and faster than it was 6 years ago ? Possibly his code that was originally on dave, has evolved and been optimized and would now run perfectly well on TT2’s chip ?
Whether that in itself would make things sound better, thats robs domain, but less elaborate programming does not mean that you end up with a dumb sounding brother compared to dave.
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TT2 was never meant to beat dave, it would of been a stupid move to make, yes TT2 and HMS is better than dave, but dave+blue or hms will always be better.
I can’t see why folk were getting in such a tizzy about it. That was aimed solely at dave owners who were getting worked up that people were saying TT2 is better. They needed rob’s assurance that it wasn’t, just to reassure themselves that they were still in this fake weird “elite pretend 8 grand club”.
They were worried that their 8 grand device was being bettered by a 4k device. They were getting worried that they were now in amongst the minions who can only afford to spend 4k. And I’m not joking. If Rob said yes, TT2 beats dave as a joke, but never came back to say he was only joking, a good whack of you would of sold dave and bought TT2.
My cups of tea are the best in the world, so whose gunna hang on my each and every word ? Nobody ? Is that because it’s a stupid thing to do ? Yes, it is a stupid thing to do, but thats exactly what some of you here do with rob.
You get in a tizzy and then call for dad.
Anyway.
I will say this, Rob mentioned that he was shocked at how poorly TT2 performed next to Dave. Well Rob, you must of known that pretty early in the dev/prototype phase, so why continue with a design that you were shocked at ?
Why not amend the design, or was there pressure from chord to hurry up and get it finished so they could throw yet another device onto the market as quickly as humanly possibly ?
Pretty poor of you to come on here and say you were shocked at how badly one of your designs performed when compared to dave.
Folk have just spent 4 grand on it, and now you tell us you were shocked at its performance, way to go Rob.
Why didn’t you mention that critical piece of information before they went on sale ?
NOT AMUSED!
