DACs — Chord Hugo TT2

The engine of the Chord Hugo TT2 is a Xilinx Artix 7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) custom coded by Rob Watts – it consists of 86 cores, each running in parallel at 208 MHz, and the overall system design is now based on ten elements. As result, the time reconstruction filter, 16FS WTA 1, operates with 16x oversampling and an accuracy of 98,304 weighting coefficients (taps). Disclaimer - Hugo 2 operated with 49,152 taps.

The Chord Hugo TT2 uses a brand-new discrete output stage with second-order noise-shaping integrated between the DAC output and filter, which together with a powerful FPGA provides impressive technical characteristics - distortion does not exceed 0.00008%, channel separation reaches 138 dB and a dynamic range is 127 dB. The system is upgradeable using an external proprietary scaler Hugo M Scaler (filtering with a one million weighting taps).

The model is equipped with High End level preamplifier and headphone amplifier sections – the output power reaches 288 mW at 300 Ohm or 7.1 V at 8 Ohm with unbalanced connection and reaches 1.15 V at 300 Ohm and 18 V at 8 Ohm with a balanced connection (output impedance - 0.042 Ohm). The DAC is powered by an external Li-Po battery power supply at 5A, 9.3V RMS using six super capacitors.

Chord Hugo TT2 offers a full set of interfaces: USB Type-B, a pair of coaxial BNC-based connectors, a pair of optical interfaces and a Bluetooth AptX module. The outputs here include XLR, RCA, a pair of 6.5 mm jacks for connecting headphones and one 3.5 mm minijack, as well as two DX BNC (they are reserved for the future). The device can receive PCM signals with parameters up to 32 bit / 768 kHz, DSD - up to DoP 512 or pure DSD512 (only in the Windows environment).