LCD-5 x Hugo TT 2 DAC Headphone Amplifier

Transparency, Resolution, and Speed
The LCD-5 Planar Magnetic Headphone sets a new standard for accuracy. Its drivers are engineered with Audeze’s award-winning Fluxor magnets and updated Fazor waveguides along with our new Patent-pending Parallel Uniforce™ voice coils, which employ varying width parallel traces to keep the impedance low and provide increased voltage headroom by altering the current density within each trace. The uniform force created by this optimization lowers distortion and provides better control over diaphragm movement, resulting in improved sonic resolution.

Clarity and Imaging
Audeze has optimized every aspect of the LCD-5 Planar Magnetic Headphone’s acoustic chamber to achieve pinpoint imaging and an extremely clean and clear soundstage. The new sculpted earpads and acoustically transparent mesh are designed to minimize reflections and resonance, while the Parallel Uniforce™ voice coil allows increased space between magnets for improved frequency response and a more open soundstage. LCD-5 also features newly designed low-profile Fazor waveguides to further reduce diffractions and interactions with the ear.

Elegant Comfortable Design
Weighing in at only 420 grams, the LCD-5 Planar Magnetic Headphone offers hours of listening pleasure. Every part has been re-engineered, using materials such as magnesium, aluminum, and acetate which offer lightweight and high rigidity. When you put on a pair of LCD-5s, your head and ears are cradled in materials of the finest quality. Supple premium leather and carbon fiber pull all the elements together into a package of the finest craftsmanship, which we hand-assemble in our California workshop.

Sculpted Earpads
Audeze’s new sculpted, internally sloped earpad architecture reduces unwanted resonances and interior reflections. The ergonomic design cradles your cranium and helps naturally place the headphone in the optimal listening position. The pads have less contact surface area than standard designs to reduce fatigue while providing a superior seal for all shapes and sizes.

Ultra High Purity Cable
The LCD-5 Planar Magnetic Headphone cable is specially tuned with directional OCC high-purity copper strands that provide low capacitance and low resistance path for the signal to travel from your amp to the drivers, maintaining unsurpassed clarity and precision.

Hugo TT v2 Overview

Chord Electronic’s Hugo TT 2 DAC Headphone Amplifier 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, distilling 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 tabletop 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 unrivaled audio.

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 a peak output of 5A, 9.3V RMS.

Finally, it also brings home the much-loved four-stage user-selectable filter controls introduced with Hugo TT 2 DAC Headphone Amplifier 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.

“There isn’t another DAC around at anywhere near this sort of price able to communicate so torrentially, so unambiguously or so effortlessly. We like it a lot.” – What Hi-Fi?