[iridium7777]

even at 4 seconds a day off, it's 99.9953703704% accurate per day. i think this thread is perfect because someone a few posts ago said that people bet their companies on specs, and yes, a grand seiko tuned to 10 seconds a year is much more accurate than his rolex, but at essentially 1000ths of a precision digit they're 100% accurate. do you think your car's speedometer is that accurate? or can you differentiate something at 0.00X dB level?

Just saying your Rolex is "very accurate" does not "goes to show" anything at all. Especially considering that your Rolex is in reality horrendously inaccurate! Most probably your Rolex is accurate to within about 4 secs a day, possibly about 2 secs a day if it's just been serviced. Your Rolex is about a hundred times less accurate than a high accuracy quartz watch and about a hundred trillion times less accurate than the most accurate clock! All of which goes to show that generalisations absolutely CAN be made about the accuracy of mechanical watches!!

G

 

[Laura80]

Those are all in line with my findings. The whole cable debate especially is just sheer madness. I wonder whether these people also upgrade the cables for their coffemakers, powertools and shavers? Y'know to get that PERFECT cup of coffee/trim on the hedge/shave!

Heh..I actually forgot that this thread is about the maker of the Hugo 2.
Gotta say, as much as he seems to know what he's talking about (to the uninitiated mind you) it all falls apart when you plug in his pricey device and compare it to another much cheaper well-functioning dac.
If one is in it for the looks, build quality, functions and bragging rights then by all means be my guest. Soundquality-wise though it's pretty much the emperor's new clothes revised for audio enthusiasts.

In the summit fi section Chord related threads always seem the current topic of conversation so I occasionally pop in to read. A lot of what is been discussed is way over my head (very technical) but there does seem to be immense pride in ownership and satisfaction.

I also watched part of the op video in which they guy stated sales of over 70k of the mojo product.

Surely a manufacturer can’t sell in such volume and success if product has no audible advantage?

 

[castleofargh]

Surely a manufacturer can’t sell in such volume and success if product has no audible advantage?

I seriously doubt this. money attracts money and marketing creates fame. a product would need to really be massively different sonically for that variable to become the actual cause of fame. but for DACs, it's not really possible anymore. even cheap DACs measure very well. fidelity advancements have been intersecting with the limits of hearing threshold for many years now, making the margin for audible progress extremely thin. I'm at a point where if I do notice a big difference, I'm going to assume that the listening level is different, or that one device has a serious fidelity issue. I don't believe at this point that a DAC can sound night and day different by increasing fidelity. it's only my opinion of course.
plus you have to consider that just a tiny portion of the buyers got to try the DAC before purchasing it. so obviously marketing is the real motivator for most people. even if marketing comes in the form of a superlative review.


ps: my reply is for the portion I quoted, and about DACs in general. I have no experience of the latest Chord products.

 

[bigshot]

How many Frenchmen can't be wrong?

 

[Laura80]

I seriously doubt this. money attracts money and marketing creates fame. a product would need to really be massively different sonically for that variable to become the actual cause of fame. but for DACs, it's not really possible anymore. even cheap DACs measure very well. fidelity advancements have been intersecting with the limits of hearing threshold for many years now, making the margin for audible progress extremely thin. I'm at a point where if I do notice a big difference, I'm going to assume that the listening level is different, or that one device has a serious fidelity issue. I don't believe at this point that a DAC can sound night and day different by increasing fidelity. it's only my opinion of course.
plus you have to consider that just a tiny portion of the buyers got to try the DAC before purchasing it. so obviously marketing is the real motivator for most people. even if marketing comes in the form of a superlative review.


ps: my reply is for the portion I quoted, and about DACs in general. I have no experience of the latest Chord products.

I haven’t any experience with Chord products whatsoever so can’t pass any personal judgement.

Some of their products certainly look exotic, one of them even looks like a spaceship.

 

[bfreedma]

I haven’t any experience with Chord products whatsoever so can’t pass any personal judgement.

Some of their products certainly look exotic, one of them even looks like a spaceship.

The look/design is just another marketing strategy to appear exotic and separate themselves from the herd. If someone likes the design, great, but it doesn’t make them technically superior products. In reality, it just makes the user interface unnecessarily complicated and hard to work with. Colors instead of numerics? No thanks.

 

[Phronesis]

I haven’t any experience with Chord products whatsoever so can’t pass any personal judgement.

Some of their products certainly look exotic, one of them even looks like a spaceship.

Yes, I think some of the non-audio selling points are:

- Interesting futuristic design, with multi-color glowing control balls that feel interesting to the touch
- The heat they generate makes it seem like they're working hard
- FPGA technology sounds cool
- The name "Chord" is simple and implies music
- Great reviews and lots of sales create fame which begets more fame
- Prices are high enough to send a message of a premium product, but not so high that many people can't afford to buy them

Maybe they do sound better than other stuff? I have doubts, but since I already own them, I'm happy to allow placebo effects to do their thing.

 

[Amberlamps]

I seriously doubt this. money attracts money and marketing creates fame. a product would need to really be massively different sonically for that variable to become the actual cause of fame. but for DACs, it's not really possible anymore. even cheap DACs measure very well. fidelity advancements have been intersecting with the limits of hearing threshold for many years now, making the margin for audible progress extremely thin. I'm at a point where if I do notice a big difference, I'm going to assume that the listening level is different, or that one device has a serious fidelity issue. I don't believe at this point that a DAC can sound night and day different by increasing fidelity. it's only my opinion of course.
plus you have to consider that just a tiny portion of the buyers got to try the DAC before purchasing it. so obviously marketing is the real motivator for most people. even if marketing comes in the form of a superlative review.


ps: my reply is for the portion I quoted, and about DACs in general. I have no experience of the latest Chord products.

I’m no audiophile, but what I do know is, my dacs, they all sound different, my pc sound card, ipad, iphone, mojo, Hugo 2.

Hugo 2 beats every single one of them by a huge margin, the difference between pre hugo 2 and post hugo 2 was like being blind and then suddenley being able to see again. Thats how big of a difference it is/was. Mojo, not so much, but the sound quality in hugo was too obvious to deny it was great.

This is coming from someone who has only started to get into digital audio in the last 2 years.

I’m not saying anyone is wrong or right, all I’m saying is, every dac that I have heard to date, they come nowhere near hugo 2. No doubt there will be dacs that sound the same or better, but they will probably be in the same price range as hugo 2.

Just to reiterate, I’m no audiophile and I’m loyal to no company, but I really cannot deny to myself just how good a dac Hugo 2 really is. It’s so good that for the first time in my life, I was hearing details in songs that I had never heard before, and heard it with ease. I’m sure many Hugo 2 owners will be able to say the samething.

Thats all I have to say about the subject.

Disclaimer, maybe I can’t get all technical, but the difference between my other dacs and Hugo 2 is stupid obvious, if no one believes me, all I can say is to try one.

 

[bfreedma]

Here we go again...

If the differences are “stupid obvious”, then they would be easily measurable. Yet somehow, they never show up in actual measurements.

 

[Whazzzup]

I wonder what some chord users take for vitamins. It seems every upgrade is huge...

 

[bigshot]

Disclaimer, maybe I can’t get all technical, but the difference between my other dacs and Hugo 2 is stupid obvious, if no one believes me, all I can say is to try one.

I'm assuming that your opinion isn't based on any controlled testing. Is there any reason to believe that your DAC does sound different other than your subjective impression? Do the published specs show an audible difference? If you are absolutely sure that this DAC sounds different, would you be willing to lend it to us for some controlled listening tests and measurements?

 

[Amberlamps]

I'm assuming that your opinion isn't based on any controlled testing. Is there any reason to believe that your DAC does sound different other than your subjective impression? Do the published specs show an audible difference? If you are absolutely sure that this DAC sounds different, would you be willing to lend it to us for some controlled listening tests and measurements?

No, my opinion isn’t based on controlled testing, it was done purely with my ears, and I have no dog/horse in this race, I’m just pointing out how much of a difference Hugo 2 was for me compared to my other dacs.

It was obvious mere seconds after I pushed play, my other dacs are not on the same level, some are not even playing the same game, thats how big of a difference it is compared to my other dac chips.

Here comes the weird part, Mojo, it uses the same chip as Hugo 2, but just running at half the speed of Hugo’s and even that didn’t come close in my opinion. The wow affect with Hugo 2 was missing in mojo, but there are times when mojo does show that brilliance, just not as much as it is in Hugo 2.

Sadly, I won’t be shipping a £2000 product to someone I don’t know in America, however, if there is anyone who lives near me that has testing equipment, they are most welcome to come to me to test it.

I’m located in the UK, up north.

Anyone who knows me on the forums will be able to confirm to you that I give Chord no quarter when it comes to a dodgy product, chord poly for example, I was probably thee most vocal critic, but they fixed it and it works for me.

If there is no one close to me who can test, why not go visit a Chord dealer in the states and see if they can help you test, if not, why not ask if they do home demo’s and you can test it in your demo period ?

Again, I have no dog/horse in this race, but the sound difference with hugo2 compared to my other dacs is not small, its a pronounced difference.

Also, online purchases in the uk have a 14 day return for any reason period. If it sounded exactly the same as mojo, I would of returned it and saved myself 2 grand.

 

[Steve999]

Maybe they do sound better than other stuff? I have doubts, but since I already own them, I'm happy to allow placebo effects to do their thing.

 

[castleofargh]

I’m no audiophile, but what I do know is, my dacs, they all sound different, my pc sound card, ipad, iphone, mojo, Hugo 2.

Hugo 2 beats every single one of them by a huge margin, the difference between pre hugo 2 and post hugo 2 was like being blind and then suddenley being able to see again. Thats how big of a difference it is/was. Mojo, not so much, but the sound quality in hugo was too obvious to deny it was great.

This is coming from someone who has only started to get into digital audio in the last 2 years.

I’m not saying anyone is wrong or right, all I’m saying is, every dac that I have heard to date, they come nowhere near hugo 2. No doubt there will be dacs that sound the same or better, but they will probably be in the same price range as hugo 2.

Just to reiterate, I’m no audiophile and I’m loyal to no company, but I really cannot deny to myself just how good a dac Hugo 2 really is. It’s so good that for the first time in my life, I was hearing details in songs that I had never heard before, and heard it with ease. I’m sure many Hugo 2 owners will be able to say the samething.

Thats all I have to say about the subject.

Disclaimer, maybe I can’t get all technical, but the difference between my other dacs and Hugo 2 is stupid obvious, if no one believes me, all I can say is to try one.

there is a need to be specific here.
1/ you're talking about a DAC/amp, are you describing using purely the DAC part(if that's possible)? otherwise, I don't think this is a relevant example as the amp section could very well cause most of whatever difference you experience.
2/ obviously there is the question of the testing method. I have very little faith in sighted experiences, mostly because of how often they've been proved to be wrong for me and many other humans. there is a habit of burying our head in the sand and pretend that uncontrolled impressions are the best impressions, but they're for sure not the most reliable impressions about sound.
as I mentioned, the simple issue of properly matching the listening levels between 2 devices is a major factor in perceiving differences or not. out of the few line outputs I have available, a DAP's LO is at 0.25V, while a desktop DAC outputs around 2.5V full scale. of course that's a 20dB difference and nobody would mistake that for just a difference in sound quality, soundstage, details... but DACs do come in all sorts of output voltages. often just off of the old 2V standard, noticeably different but not yet feeling like a clear change in loudness. again, I became so insistent on this only because of how drastically different my own impressions were between just trying gears casually, and having both gears volume matched to as little as 0.1dB(when possible). they're the same gears, same audio quality, and yet my impressions turn out to be drastically different with matched outputs(sometimes they do help me notice a specific change I didn't notice before, so it can go both ways). but this got me to become very supicious of impressions formed without at least a clean volume matching(matching by ear isn't always enough sadly). it's nothing against you or the legendary tradition from everything said on the web to be 100% true ^_^, it's just that I like to rely on solid information as long as it's possible.

I don't have those devices so I won't just go and say that you're wrong and they don't have any audible differences. I simply don't know that. but when you spend a few years in this hobby, you meet a lot of people who claim night and day differences between a DAC and a DAC with a twig on top of it that costs 5 times the price of the other. so you just grow a thick skeptical skin. from the few specs I rapidly googled, the Hugo2 seems to be very clean device, so I'm also not trying to spit on it in any way. I'm just interested in properly acquired data about the sound before we decide that we know how different the sound is. even more so when I didn't get to listen to it myself.

 

[bigshot]

No, my opinion isn’t based on controlled testing.

OK. Here in Sound Science we know that subjective impressions based on tests with no controls can be completely wrong at times. This forum is the only place in Head Fi where we ask for evidence to back up claims. Can you point to any measurements that indicate that there is an audible difference? Has anyone else done controlled listening tests? The reason I ask is because I do controlled tests of every piece of audio equipment I buy and I have dozens and dozens in all different price ranges and they all sound exactly the same. There are plenty of other people here in this forum who have done the same as me and came up with the same results.

There is a concept called audible transparency. That means that sound reproduction has reached the degree of fidelity that it exceeds the ability of human ears to hear differences. DACs and amps are designed to be audibly transparent. If they aren't, either they are colored, meaning they have a deliberately different sound, or they are defective. We would be happy to help you find out if your DAC is transparent, colored or defective if you would like our help. Just let us know.

But I'm afraid if you have no evidence to back up your claim, then we're free to think that the difference is probably a result of your casual way of comparing, not because the DAC actually sounds different. My advice is however, that you might want to check into it. Because if a DAC does sound different than other DACs, odds are it is defective either by design or due to a manufacturing defect. If it's still under warranty you could get it repaired.