Any discussion about DAC Technology should include the developments made by Rob Watts and John Franks of Chord Electronics. Custom Coded FPGA chips with over 500k lines of code replace off the shelf DAC chips. Thier new Hugo TT 2 also receives the benefit of an upgrade from 4-element design to a 10-element design, which works in harmony with the radically upgraded FPGA and code. In comparison to the 256-tap filters that traditional chip DACs may run, Hugo TT 2’s more 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. That horsepower does more than just connect the dots of data to create an analog waveform, it creates a soundscape.
