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Hugo TT2

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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 distils over 20 years of digital development by Rob Watts and takes advantage of the very latest technology.

As expected, it delivers radically improved technical specifications and measurements across the board and exhibits 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 being eclipsed by DAVE.

Delving deeper, in comparison to the 256-tap filters that traditional chip DACs may 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 multi-award winning transportable brother, 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 radically upgraded FPGA and code to deliver unrivalled audio.

Front of the silver Hugo TT 2: the MENU, SET and power buttons, the green AMP display, the green volume sphere, and the 3.5 mm and two 6.35 mm headphone outputs

A brand new high-power discreet output stage coupled with second-order noise-shaping integrated between the DAC output and filter is also employed to massively reduce distortion. Further improvements have also been made to the power delivery. 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 peak output of 5A, 9.3V RMS.

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

Hugo TT 2 can be upgraded at any time with the addition of M Scaler, Chord's 1M-tap digital upscaling device.

More photographs

Rear of the silver Hugo TT 2: DC inlet, RCA outputs and inputs, a pair of balanced XLR outputs, BNC coax, two optical inputs and USB
The silver Hugo TT 2 in three-quarter view, showing the Hugo TT2 engraving and the blue-lit porthole over the circuit board
The three-box Table Top system in silver: Hugo TT 2 on top of the Hugo M Scaler, with the BerTTi power amplifier at the foot

The story on this page is Chord Electronics's own, reprinted by Joenit, its official distributor.