Hey, this is Drew Baird from Moon Audio and
we're here to talk about the Hugo 2
today. We're gonna do some comparisons to
the older model, we're gonna talk about
some of the connection options and how
to use the Hugo 2. We're also going to
talk about some exciting new things that
will be coming out from Chord this Fall.
First let's talk about a little bit of
some comparisons between the original
Hugo and the Hugo 2. The Hugo is without
a doubt a groundbreaking product. Nobody
had produced a portable headphone amp
DAC of this sort of quality and caliber
before. There really was no other
comparison in the field in my opinion,
and amazingly enough, Hugo 2 is still a
groundbreaking product in that now they
have doubled the processing power from
the original Hugo. They've maintained the
battery life, which is very impressive,
they've made lots of improvements to the
chassis and the connections, they've
added a filtering scheme now - digital
filtering - to sort of shape, if you will,
the sound characteristics of the filter.
The chassis is much nicer, connections
are flusher, easier to connect to all
your existing cables. We had a little bit
of a problem with the original Hugo, the
first iteration, in that RCA cables and
coax cables just weren't connecting
properly because of the chassis. All of
these bugs have been worked out. Like I
said, the battery power has remained
constant between Hugo 2 and Hugo 1, which
is just absolutely amazing considering
the doubling of the processing power
that you're still getting about eight to
nine hours of battery life. It really
comes down to what kind of headphones
you have. If you're using IEMs, obviously
the load is a lot less demanding on a
battery and so you should get
longer battery life. If you're using
something a little more demanding, let's
say an Audeze LCD - planar
magnetics tend to use a lot of power and
can eat up the battery life, so in that
instance you may see some shorter
battery times, but we're not talking
about, you know, a couple hours. We're
talking about probably like six hours or
something like that before we have to
charge.
I always carry an external battery pack
with me when I'm traveling and I would
recommend it just because, you know, if
you're on a long flight from here to
Tokyo you may not
get a full battery life all through
your trip. They've added a filtering
scheme to it. They've added more
crossfade options, they've added control
balls for all of these settings versus
the touch buttons that they had
before. What the digital filtering did, as
I alluded to earlier, it tames some of
the harshness. If you're listening to a
recording that's very analytical and
maybe a little stringent you can change
the filter, smooth it out, roll it off a
little bit, make it more musical. The
crossfade is a very exciting function.
Essentially, what it tries to do is
create a 3-D holographic sound for
headphones. Some true die-hard audiophiles
may not like this, but others may
enjoy playing around with this. I find I
like it the most when I'm using the Hugo
2 to watch movies on a computer or
an iPad. That's where I really want to be
enveloped in the sound, if you will. And
they've changed the input connection as
well to one of these ball features. I
like it a lot better than the very small
button they used to have on the backside
of the Hugo one. It was a little
complicated to figure out where I was
going in terms of inputs and crossfade
filtering. You always have to carry
around, unfortunately still now, the color
code sheet for all the connections
because each one has a colored light.
There is no display on this that tells
you, okay, you're on filter one, filter two.
You've got to remember what the colors
are. Same thing with the inputs. Some of
the things I've memorized from constant
use with the devices but some you may
still forget. There's just too many to
keep up with. The Bluetooth has been
greatly improved on the Hugo 2 and they
put a much larger antenna in it, it's got
a longer range. It also does much better,
cleaner, better sounding resolution. Most
of the time, Bluetooth, I'm just not
excited about it, but every once in a
while now I find myself using the
Bluetooth to connect to devices that I
don't typically use. I'm using this more
versatilely with other devices and I've
seen that the improvement in the
Bluetooth is quite significant. Other
features: They've now bumped up the
resolution processing power of what you
can do on the inputs all the way up to
768 kilohertz resolution, which is just
astronomical. I realize there's not a
whole lot of software out there with
that high of
resolution yet, but rest assured that
Hugo 2 is ready for it. So let's take a
closer look at each device. Ok, so here we
are taking a closer look at the USB
power inputs control side of the Hugo 1
and Hugo 2. We'll notice on the original
Hugo there wasn't a whole lot of writing,
so you basically had to memorize
essentially what each one of the inputs
were, which controls did what. Essentially
this first one was the input control for
for going through and choosing USB,
Toslink, coax or your standard definition
USB audio from your iPhone or Android
device. The next button was the crossfade,
which we've talked about earlier that
can create a 3-D holographic
envelopment of the sound with headphones.
Then we move on to the standard
definition USB audio connection. This is
for connecting your iPhone or Android
phone at a lower resolution -- good
CD-quality resolution, but not high-res.
Then we move on to the high-res USB
input. This is where you would connect it
to a computer and you'd be able to do
PCM, DSD, any resolution that you can
throw at it this unit can process. Then
you have the power switch and then the
DC barrel charging port. Hugo 2 now has
switched to a different 5 volt USB
charger wall-wart now. I would highly
recommend, as we've talked about with the
Mojo before, that you have a USB charger
that's at least 2 amps or higher. I
would never use your computer to try and
charge a device like this. It only
outputs about one amp of power and it'll
take forever to charge, and it really
doesn't charge the device effectively. So
make sure that your charger says at
least two amps or higher and 5 volts. A
standard charger that comes with your
iPhone isn't gonna do it. It's less than
one amp, so I recommend you picking up
one like our Tronsmart, which is a 3 amp,
or if you've got like everybody else a
drawer full of phone chargers, check them
all out and see which one's two amp. We've
now narrowed it down to just 1 USB input,
so the Hugo 2 now auto senses what sort
of device is connected to the USB, that
be a phone or computer and it
automatically knows what to do and how
to route the audio filtering. We've now,
like I said, gone to a roller ball input
button selector switch. It's labeled now,
so it's easy to find. You don't
necessarily have to remember all the
colors, you know. Obviously if you've only
got one device connected to the Hugo 2
and you start pushing that input device
you'll see a light pop up inside the
Hugo 2 that tells you that you've locked
onto a digital signal, so that usually
means that you've gotten to the right
input. The filter, which we did not have
on the original Hugo 2. We do digital
filtering, which we can shape the sound
of the music either warmer or sharper
for more of an analog audio -- I mean not
analog -- well the warmer would be analog,
but it's still, you know, it's a warm
digital processor but I can't say that
it sounds like a turntable at this point.
But you can do a sharp, or a lot more
audiophile analytical sound, you know,
depending on the filter as well. We've
also added a couple more functions to
the crossfade. Before I think there were
only maybe two crossfade functions. Now I
think we have four. The power is now not a
switch but a ball, so it'll go through a
power cycle and light up when you've got
power. It'll tell you battery life now.
Depending on the color what your battery
life is at. And you'll notice two
little divots
on each side of the Hugo 2. This is for a
future product that hasn't really been
talked about yet. Supposedly, it will be
called the 2go, which is essentially a
Poly for the Hugo 2. I think it's gonna
probably be a lot more powerful. I'm
hoping it's going to have more than just
one SD card slot so you can really have
a large library of music to go with the
Hugo. You'll notice that the Bluetooth
antenna is quite a bit larger than the
original one. This gives for a much
larger distance that you can connect a
bluetooth device to the unit. I think the
original one was something like five
meters and I think we're now up to like
15 meters. I must say that the Bluetooth,
as I said before, has greatly improved in
sound quality. So let's take a look at
the other side. So here we are in the
opposite side of the devices and you'll
notice first that the volume control now
has a little more of a raised section
here. I actually find a little bit of a
difference in usability of the volume
control on the Hugo 2 over the Hugo one.
You know ergonomics make a big
difference. I wouldn't say this is some
sort of drastic change, but it just feels
a little more comfortable when it's
raised like this instead of recessed
down into the chassis. You'll also notice
that we still have a quarter inch jack
for headphones a mini jack. The mini jack
is no longer recessed, as you see here,
which in some cases caused issues
especially with right angle connections.
If the right angle connection was too
sharp it just wouldn't work and you'd
always have to use a straight connection
on the original Hugo. We're now flush
here, so that no matter what the
connection you're using -- and we haven't
found one that doesn't fit yet. I alluded
earlier to the issues we had with the
coax jack and the RCAs and the amount
of room around them to fit common RCA
connections. We found a great connector
made by Kimber Cable that worked very
well on this coax input, but of all the
other RCAs that we had none of them
worked except for this one connection.
They've changed the coax now so that
it's a mini jack, and we'll get to that
in a second. You'll see here that the
analog inputs were still larger than
the original Hugo one production unit
that came out, but there still were a few
issues with RCAs fitting. They've made
them larger. We haven't found any issues
yet. I'm sure there are some very
high-end audiophile-grade RCAs out there,
you know, an inch in diameter that aren't
going to fit here, but for the most part
I would say 90% of all RCAs are now
fitting in these analog outputs. We still
have an optical input as we did in the
Hugo 1 that was recessed as well. We
had some issues with finding an
appropriate connector to work on that. We
did solve that and had our Silver Dragon
Toslink cable that worked fine with that
recessed jack. You'll notice before that
they had a protective cover for the
Toslink, now they have a door. Please make
sure to go to our Silver Dragon Toslink
cable and read about how to properly
insert your Toslink cable when you've
got an optical door. if you push it straight in
you're gonna scratch your Toslink cable
and damage it, and you'll find over time
you're not going to be able to do
high-resolution audio, only lower
resolution audio, because you've
scratched the optical glass fiber that's
in the middle of the cable. So please
visit that. It's very important so that
you keep your optical cable working well.
Optical is still limited to 192
kilohertz input. This has nothing to do
with Chord, and it has to do with send
and receiver chips of optical. It's only
been able to do 192 max. I don't see that
really ever changing in the future. The
coax will give you a 384 digital input
from a source device. We'll talk about in
a little bit when we go over some
exciting new products from Chord, how you
can increase the resolution of that
input. Obviously the RCA analog outputs
are for connecting this Hugo 2 to your
home stereo so you can use this not only
as a portable DAC and headphone amp and
preamp but you can use it in your home stereo
system, making this device extremely versatile.
There's some new exciting products
coming out from Chord this Fall.
The revised version of the
Hugo TT, now called the Hugo2 TT, a new
product called the M Scaler that a lot
of people are very excited about. This is
a product that can be used with a whole
host of Chord products. The Hugo 2 TT
essentially is the DAC section out of
the Hugo 2. The amplifier section has
greatly been revised, unlike the original
TT that for the most part mimicked the
original Hugo. They added a much larger
capacity bank, balanced outputs for your
stereo, but for the most part it was
basically a Hugo with a couple added
features. The Hugo TT 2 has so much more.
The new headphone amp that's provided in
that device is extremely powerful. In
fact, Rob Watts said that it can
potentially drive speakers. Now I
wouldn't imagine them to to drive the
big Focal Sopras that we have here
in house, but I would imagine that
smaller bookshelves and loudspeakers
that are sensitive should be very easy
to drive. Now we haven't had a TT 2 in
here yet to test. We'll come back to that
once it comes out in the Fall. The other
device, the M Scaler,
is a very interesting device and it goes
back to some of the black box devices
that were produced back in the '90s. If
you remember, they were called
upsamplers. Essentially this device can
take your CD quality 44.1 and
essentially multiply it 16 times to get
you a much higher resolution for higher
quality sound listening. They've already
got this implemented into their Blu 2
CD transport, which does all the same
functions as the M Scaler but also has a
transport in it. Well as we're getting
away from CDs it seems this day, I think
much more people are excited about this
M scaler in that it can be used to
connect to your computer. It can be
connected to your existing DACs and
existing digital sources, making it much
more versatile. It doesn't just have to
be used with other Chord products. Now
in talking about which Chord products
you can connect the M scaler to,
unfortunately the Mojo isn't one of them.
You know, the Mojo was designed to be a
great bang for the buck.
Phenomenal sounding, a product they can
get into so many more people's hands
that can't afford some of the higher-end
products, but unfortunately the M Scaler
will not be able to be used with that. A
few of the products that it will work
with are the Qutest, the Hugo 2, the
flagship Dave, and of course the Hugo TT 2,
which will be out in the Fall. I don't
have a unit yet, so I can't show you a
whole lot about it. Essentially how
you're going to connect the device, the M
Scaler, to these other products is via two
digital cables with BNCs on both ends.
It's a double connection process and
what it's going to do, more so with the
Hugo 2, is the original coax jack was
only capable of handling 384 resolution,
but now when you go to this dual cable
BNC on one end and a mini jack on the
other and connected to the M scaler, now
you boosted that resolution up to 768.
That's pretty impressive. The Qutest is
already set up with dual BNC so you
can simply use two BNC digital 75 ohm
coax cables to connect the M Scaler to the
Qutest. Same thing being said here on the
Dave. You'll see we've got our Silver
Dragon digital cables with our Furutech
BNCs already connected. And this
can connect, essentially, straight up to
the M scaler
resulting in much higher resolution. So I
hope you've enjoyed what we've talked
about today on exciting new products
coming from Chord, connection options for
the various devices. I think we've got a
very exciting Fall to look forward to
with these new products. We'll plan on
doing videos on each one of them when
they come out, and thank you for joining us.