Chord Hugo 2

Paul Miller measured 825 mW into 25 ohms at the highest unclipped volume step, against Chord's published 740 mW into 32 ohms, 94 mW into 300 ohms and 1050 mW into 8 ohms. Maximum output is 4.58 V line out; the unit will swing past 5.2 V but clips there. There is no separate amplifier stage — Chord drives the headphone jacks straight from the converter's Class A output.

⚠ vs. listeners — Three labs give three output impedances: Chord publishes 0.025 ohm, Miller reports sub-1 ohm, and Amir Majidimehr measured 1.7 ohm in 2018, appending a note that his figure would read high if the unit clipped under his 33 ohm load. The spread does not change the buying decision — every figure is low enough to leave a headphone's frequency response alone — but it is a reminder that a single published impedance number is rarely reproduced exactly.

A-weighted signal-to-noise is 116.1 dB relative to full line-level output and 104 dB referenced to 10 mW into 25 ohms; Chord publishes 2.6 uV A-weighted noise and a 126 dB SNR. Jitter is 5-8 psec over the isolated inputs. Amir Majidimehr's 50 mV headphone-output test placed it around the middle of his portable chart, and his 2022 bench initially picked up computer noise over the USB input that vanished on Toslink.

⚠ vs. listeners — The two labs are testing different things, not contradicting each other: the class-leading figure is line level, the average one is the headphone output at low listening levels. Both are true, and which you meet depends on whether you plug in a 12-ohm in-ear or a 300-ohm headphone.

Distortion under headphone load runs 0.00006-0.0009% from 20 Hz to 20 kHz at -10 dBFS, rising to 0.005% through bass and midrange and 0.011% at 20 kHz into 25 ohms. Amir Majidimehr's 2018 bench found "no obvious design/execution problems" and his 2022 bench called the portable performance superb — while noting that the 49,152-tap filter bought no measurable advantage over an Exasound E32 or a Topping DX7.

⚠ vs. listeners — If the box measures essentially transparent, a reproducible complaint about its tonal balance ought not to exist — yet it does, in every source class. Two things anchor it. Chord itself ships two of its four filters purely to roll the treble off, which is an admission that some listeners will want the top trimmed; Miller measured that roll-off at -0.85 dB at 20 kHz, Majidimehr at about 1 dB. And the loudest praise comes from reviewers who also reach for it: Headfonia's Lieven Vranken says he keeps going back to the high-frequency roll-off setting with almost every headphone he uses. The likeliest reading is that the disagreement is about how a genuinely uncoloured source interacts with already-bright headphones, not about a flaw in the converter.

USB carries PCM to 768 kHz/32-bit and DSD512; coaxial over a 3.5 mm jack reaches 384 kHz, or 768 kHz in dual-data mode with an M Scaler; Chord's current specification caps optical at 96 kHz. Bluetooth is aptX only, not aptX HD. The filters do measure, but only just: -0.85 dB at 20 kHz for the two roll-off settings against a flat response for the default.

The clearest tally of the sceptical camp is the poll on the Audio Science Review review thread: of 319 voters, 80 rated it "Poor" and 114 "Not terrible" — 60.8% combined — against 92 "Fine" and 33 "Great". Head-Fi's showcase pulls the other way, with owner ratings clustered at 4.0 to 5.0 stars, but "Price" is the single most common entry across those same reviewers' Cons boxes.