Chord Hugo TT2 £3,995
Chord Electronics are the current kings of headphone amplification and have been blazing a trail in audiophile circles with their quirky looking but sensational-sounding products. The pocket-sized
Chord Mojo (£399) first showed how easy it is to improve audio performance vastly, but the Chord Hugo TT2 opened my ears to another world.
At £4,000, we’re deep into audiophile territory here and many thousands of words have already been written about the customcoded Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with 86 208MHZ cores running in parallel. But what difference does all this techno jargon really make to your listening enjoyment?
Paired with the similarly priced Audeze LCD-4Z headphones and my Macbook, streaming everything from Tidal Master (MQA) recordings to 24bit/192khz files and uncompressed FLAC, the Hugo TT2 excels in every sense, reminding me of time well spent in demo rooms listening to £100,000 audio systems. In short, it’s products like the Hugo TT2 that drive people to make impassioned requests to their bank, or alternatively into hi-fi journalism. A real treat. chordelectronics.co.uk