Chord Electronics Hugo TT2 black

The Hugo TT 2 has been radically redesigned from the ground up, not only with beautiful new casework by Chief Designer John Franks, but with 5x the processing power of the original Hugo TT and double that of the multi-award-winning Hugo 2. Hugo TT 2 distills over 20 years of digital development by Rob Watts and benefits from the very latest technology.

As expected, it offers dramatically improved technical specifications and measurements across the board and presents drastic sonic benefits over its predecessor with 768kHz PCM and DSD 512 playback. Hugo TT 2 sets a new benchmark in table top audio, only eclipsed by DAVE.

Delving deeper, compared to the 256-tap filters this traditional chip DACs can run at, Hugo TT 2’s beating heart is a powerful Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA, custom coded by Chord Electronics’ Rob Watts, with 86x 208MHz cores running in parallel to create an advanced 16FS WTA 1 filter with 98,304 taps. Double that of its transportable multi-award-winning sibling, Hugo 2 (49,152). Hugo TT 2 also benefits from an upgrade from a 4-element design to a 10-element design, which works in harmony with the FPGA and the radically upgraded code to deliver unrivaled sound quality.

An all-new high-power discrete output stage coupled with 2nd-order noise-shaping integrated between the DAC output and filter are also employed to massively reduce distortion. Further improvements have also been made to the power supply. Hugo TT 2 eschews the Li-Po battery power supply of the original and ushers in six super capacitors capable of delivering huge, linear dynamic currents when the music demands it with 5A peak output, 9.3V RMS.

Hugo TT 2 also brings home the highly popular four-stage user-selectable filter controls introduced with Hugo 2 and retains the three-stage user-selectable digital crossfeed function for headphone users who wish to improve the perception of depth, similar to that of speakers.

Technical Specifications

Digital Processing

• Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) processor

Audio Performance

• Dynamic range: 127 dB A-weighted
• Stereo separation: 9 V RMS under 300 Ω - 138 dB
• Output impedance: 0.042 Ω

Output Power

• Unbalanced mode (at 1% THD)
  • 288 mW RMS under 300 Ω
  • 7.3 W RMS under 8 Ω
• Balanced mode (at 1% THD)
  • 1.15 W RMS under 300 Ω
  • 18 W RMS under 8 Ω

Distortion

• 0.00008% at 2.5 V under 300 Ω
• 0.00016% at 6 W under 8 Ω

Connectivity

Inputs

• 1 USB type B
• 2 BNC coaxial
• 2 optical
• Bluetooth

Outputs

• Stereo XLR
• Stereo RCA
• 2 headphone jacks 6.35 mm
• 1 headphone jack 3.5 mm
• 2 BNC DX (extension outputs)

Physical Characteristics

• Machined aluminum casing
• Dimensions (W × H × D): 235 × 52 × 238 mm
• Weight: 2.53 kg