ЦАПы — Chord HUGO 2

The Hugo 2 is a portable DAC and headphone amplifier from Chord Electronics, the British company based in Kent. Designed by Rob Watts, it uses a programmable FPGA running Chord's own conversion code instead of an off-the-shelf DAC chip, and it can serve as a battery-powered DAC for a phone or laptop, a desktop headphone amplifier or a line-level DAC for a hi-fi system.

Key specs that matter

Conversion runs on a Xilinx Artix-7 (XC7A15T) FPGA. Inputs are USB (micro-B), coaxial, optical and aptX Bluetooth, with PCM supported up to 768kHz over USB and DSD up to DSD512. Signal-to-noise ratio is 126dB, THD+N is below 0.0001% and output impedance is just 0.025 ohms. Outputs are 3.5mm and 6.35mm headphone sockets plus RCA line outputs. The aluminium chassis measures 21 x 100 x 130mm and weighs 365g, and the internal battery gives around seven hours of use.

Engineering and use context

Rob Watts' approach rests on the reconstruction filter - the part of a DAC that recreates the continuous signal between digital samples. The Hugo 2 uses a WTA (Watts Transient Aligned) filter with 49,152 taps, far longer than the filters built into standard DAC chips, aiming to reconstruct timing more accurately. The converter itself is a 10-element pulse array, a discrete design in which the FPGA drives resistors and switches directly rather than using a multi-bit ladder or a conventional delta-sigma chip. Because the output stage is driven so directly, output impedance stays extremely low, so headphones of any impedance are driven without their frequency response being altered by the source. Four selectable digital filters and a crossfeed function for headphone listening are provided, controlled by illuminated spherical buttons whose colours indicate sample rate, volume and settings. The battery supply isolates the circuitry from mains noise when running portably, and the unit can play while charging. A remote control is supplied for desktop use.

Pairing

As a portable, the Hugo 2 connects to phones by USB or Bluetooth and drives both sensitive IEMs and demanding full-size headphones. At home, its RCA line outputs feed an integrated amplifier or power amplifier, and its volume control allows it to drive a power amplifier directly without a preamplifier. Chord's 2go streaming module clips onto the chassis to add network streaming and local storage.

Alternatives

Chord's own Mojo 2 is a smaller, lower-priced portable DAC/headphone amplifier based on the same FPGA approach.