NDX and Chord Hugo
Posted by: Foxman50 on 18 April 2014
I have been contemplating adding a DAC to my NDX/XPS2 to see (or should that be hear) what it can bring to the party. And so thought it about time i made inroads into Having a few home demos. After looking around at products that are within my budget i came across the Chord Hugo DAC.
Although it is meant to be a portable headphone unit, it can be used as a full line level fixed DAC.
The dealer lent me a TQ black digital coax lead, which have twist grip plugs. This was required as the present batch of Hugo's have a case design fault that wont allow any decent cable to fit, soon to be rectified. Thankfully the TQ just manages to hang on to the coax port.
Once all connected and gone through the minimal setup procedure of the Hugo, what does the red LED mean again, i left it to warm up for half an hour.
Poured a beer and sat down for an evenings listening.
What was that, where did that come from, that's what that instrument is. OMG, as my little'n would say, Where is it getting all this detail from.
After spending last night and today with it, all i can say is that it has totally transformed my system from top to bottom. I never considered my NDX to be veiled or shut in, not even sure that's the correct terms. All i can say is its opened up the sound stage and space around instruments. Everything I've put through it has had my toes, feet and legs tapping away to the music.
Even putting the toe tapping, the resolution the clarity to one side, what its greatest achievement for me has been in making albums that I've had trouble listening too enjoyable now.
One added bonus is that it has made the XPS redundant. I cannot hear any difference with it in or out of the system.
While i thought a DAC may make a change in the degree of the jump from ND5 to NDX, i was not prepared for this. Anyone looking at adding a PSU to there NDX may want to check this unit out first.
For me this has to be the bargain of the year.
Problem with my Hugo…… While listening to Hendrix's "Are You Experienced", I suddenly wanted to get really stoned. Is this normal or should I call my dealer?
Waiting for it to turn up. was hoping it would be good 
If I have 44,000 samples per second from a CD, what does the Hugo actually offer that a current DAC cannot offer?
Talk of perfectly re-creating the original analogue waveform seems to be rubbish as you cannot recreate what you don't have in the first place.
Without interpolation a line drawn between these 44,000 samples will be smooth (as per the analogue waveform) anyway. Think about it or draw a graph. 44,000 per second. If I were to play 44,000 notes in a second could you hear what number 32,168 sounds like in contrast to number 32,169?
With even basic interpolation the waveform produced will be even more indistinguishable from an analogue waveform and a more than adequate approximation of the original one given the digital file. Any unwanted frequencies filtered.
If you think of the frequency being the x-axis (horizontal axis) and the word size being the y-axis (vertical axis) then we have quantisation errors in the x-axis as you describe but we also get quantisation errors in the y-axis. For me 24bit recordings sound so much better than 16bit ones, irregardless of the sampling frequency but it does seem to be very good at 24/96! I think word-length quantisation errors are more damaging to the sound quality than those due to limited sampling frequency. Remember that a 16 bit recording is only 16bit at 0db, assuming the recording actually used all the bits for the mastering. If we are -6db then we are at 15bit recording, -12db at 14bit etc. Look at music file in Audacity and see how often output levels are below -12db.
I am too old to count the number of "hugo-products" there have been in the past. Yes I suspect that at some time in the future I will give it a spin. But for now, if I want to listen to the best reproduction I play 180g vinyl pressing on my fab TT, can the Hugo play these? 