Chord Hugo 2
FOR Detailed and transparent presentation; excellent features AGAINST Multiple colours for functions are confusing “We can overlook the Hugo 2’s little foibles like a parent forgives an infant’s table-manners”
Our infatuation with
Chord’s remarkable Hugo DAC, which manifests itself in its multiple-award winning status, is as strong as ever. We can overlook little foibles, such as its wilfully quirky design, the hard-toaccess input and output sockets, like an indulgent parent forgives an infant’s table-manners. We love its thrillingly detailed, effortlessly dynamic and neatly organised sound as much now as we did the first time we heard it. So for us, at least, Chord had no need to go fiddling.
But the Chord Hugo is no more. Instead, please welcome Hugo 2. A little smaller, a little sharper around the edges, significantly more expensive than the original, and – incredibly – slightly quirkier than before.
Multi-coloured spectrum
The casework is gratifyingly smooth and crisp-edged, the quality of construction is inarguable, and the laser-cut brand and model logos are particularly pleasing. There’s no confusing Hugo 2 for a product from any other brand.
Measuring 10 x 13cm, and just 2cm high, Hugo 2 is a touch more compact than its predecessor. It’s still a big box, though, and it’s a struggle to get behind Chord’s suggestion that Hugo 2 displays “obvious portability”. Sure, it’s portable in so much as you can pick it up (it’s only 450g, thanks in large part to its high-end aluminium construction), but don’t imagine it’ll sit comfortably in a pocket for on-the-go use.
Chord has tacitly acknowledged as much by including a remote control with this latest Hugo. It’s a functional handset where the Hugo 2 itself is wildly individual, but it suggests Chord knows full well Hugo 2 is as likely to end up as a Dac/pre-amp in a static system as it is to get out and about.
Despite its reduced dimensions, Hugo 2 includes more of the colour-shifting spherical control buttons Chord originated in its Mojo DAC. There are four edgemounted buttons: the power sphere is one of five different colours to indicate charging status, the filter sphere has four colours, the input selector six (including ‘coaxial dual data mode’, which is not user-selectable) and the crossfeed control four.
The top-mounted rolling volume control runs a multi-coloured spectrum depending on the output level, and finally one of no less than 11 colours is displayed through the window into Hugo 2’s interior to indicate sample frequency of an incoming digital signal.
All of this colour-based communication makes Hugo 2 a memorable looker, and it makes a change from letters and/or numbers. But it makes for an instruction manual that doesn’t so much need reading as decoding. Surely no one is going to memorise sample rates, from 44.1khz to DSD (-512 as a maximum) as a series of 11 colours. Especially as three are a variation on purple.
Speaker effect
Hugo 2 features all the inputs and outputs you could require. Its digital optical input (a full-size TOSLINK) is good for digital audio up to 24-bit/192khz, while the digital coaxial (a 3.5mm socket) functions up to 24-bit/384khz. The final physical input is a mini-usb able to deal with information up to 32-bit/768khz and DSD512. Music can also be fed to Hugo 2 via aptx Bluetooth.
There are 3.5mm and 6.3mm headphone socket outputs, and a pair of stereo RCAS for connection to an amplifier. Despite being better spaced and more accessible than on the original Hugo, we still can’t fit our reference Chord Company (no relation) Signature Tuned Array RCA cables to the slightly recessed RCA output at the end of