Chord 2go (Streamer) & 2yu (Interface) - Official Thread

[Torq]

Chord Electronics recently announced two new digital audio products. The 2go streamer/server and the 2yu interface, which work either together with most DACs to provide high-quality wired/wireless streaming support, or the 2go can be paired directly with the Hugo 2 for a combine streamer/server/DAC.

Chord 2go - Streamer/Server

2go is a high-performance streamer/server that transforms the Hugo 2 DAC into a fully featured Wi-Fi- and Ethernet-enabled device with up to 4 TB of solid-state library playback, bringing the proven sound quality benefits of our award-winning Hugo 2 DAC technology to network audio.

It can be paired either with the Hugo 2, as shown here, or with the 2yu (below):

Full details/specs/features are available here.

Chord 2yu - Interface

The 2yu digital interface turns the 2go streamer/server into a multi-output standalone streamer capable of working with the Hugo M Scaler and a range of DACs.

The 2yu must be paired with a 2go in order to receive data, but can connect to any DAC with an RCA, BNC or TOSLINK S/PDIF input, as well as most USB 2.0 (UAC2) compliant DACs. This turns almost any DAC into a streamer, while retaining 2go’s other features.

More information on the 2yu can be found here.

[Torq]

For those that may have experienced Chord’s “Poly” (which is essentially the origin of the 2go, but for the Mojo), the issues that plagued that (and have mostly since been worked out between firmware updates and the “goFigure” app), are gone.

Setup was quick and simple and worked first time, with no need for pins, waiting, resetting, and sitting around for 20 minutes at a time.

I was wirelessly streaming HiRes Qobuz material from Roon to my Hugo 2 about 5 minutes after I opened the box. And the first two minutes of that were unboxing and bolting the 2go to the Hugo 2.

Yes, bolting.

There are two threaded holes in the USB-side of the Hugo 2, into which you screw a couple of recessed posts. You then plug the 2go into the USB side of the Hugo 2, and fasten down a couple of grub screws that securely attach it to the posts. After which, it is not going anywhere … there’s no wiggle or movement at all.

This is a much more solid arrangement than with the Mojo/Poly combination - which pretty much required using a case to keep the two firmly connected and aligned. And while such a case is supposed to be coming for the 2go/Hugo 2 combination, it isn’t needed from a solidity/connection-safety perspective.

Time for some proper listening and comparisons to Hugo 2 with/without 2go as the transport.

[Torq]

A few thoughts after some listening today:

• 2go seems to have a tenacious grip on its WiFi connection. I can listen anywhere in the house, or even across the street (four floors down) and it hasn’t dropped yet.

• 2go has been reliably following sample-rate changes in the source material, with no indication in Roon that it’s not still in LOSSLESS mode.

• 6 hours of straight listening, spread across Vérité Closed, MySphere 3.2 and UM MEST, and Hugo 2 shows about 25% battery remaining and 2go is around 50%.

• It’s VERY nice not to have cables going into/coming out of both sides of the Hugo 2.

Still need to try playing off internally mounted SD cards.

Fairly sure that Hugo 2 sounds better fed from 2go than from a direct laptop/desktop USB connection, but that needs more testing.

[Torq]

While I have had ZERO issues playing via Roon, Bluetooth or AirPlay with this thing so far … using SD card playback is another matter.

For one, inserting a couple of SD cards freaked everything out. There was no clear indication when indexing was done, or even that it was actually running. And while it was, connectivity from the goFigure app to the 2go was a cluster (had to restart the phone three times).

Installing “Rigelian” helped with that, as indexing from there at least is clear when it’s done (it actually tells you).

And once done, playback was actually fine and seamless.

Can only have one SD card slot enabled at a time … which is a bit daft if you ask me, though I understand that Chord are working on that.

But …

Replay via Roon, SD card or direct from TIDAL or Qobuz does sound better than when the Hugo 2 is fed off USB.

[Torq]

Once a card is indexed (which seems quite a bit slower than either the N8 or SP2000, for a similar amount of content), switching to it is instant … which helps.

It beats physically swapping cards at least.

But both my DAPs can index their internal and card storage into a single database seamlessly, so hopefully Chord will get that figured out.

[Torq]

And … “Rigelian” has a completely brain-dead “Album” view.

If the album has more than one artist in its tracks (e.g. almost all soundtracks, among lots of other albums) then not only does the actual album itself not show up as a whole (even though you can see the tag on the individual tracks), but the only way to play it AS an ALBUM is via folder view.

If I am going to play by folder, I don’t need to fuck about with indexes …

[Torq]

A bit more than a full day with the 2go now … with most of today was spent fiddling with microSD Card indexing and replay.

Salient notes:

• You cannot play content from the microSD cards directly via Chord’s goFigure app - unless you have created MPD (Music Player Daemon) playlists already. Instead, you need a third-party app. This is not news, if you came from Poly.

• 2go exposes two separate media-server/player interfaces simultaneously, specifically DLNA/UPnP and MPD. These require different clients/control point applications. DLNA/UPnP clients find the unit on the network without issue (Audirvana sees it, so does Linn’s “Kazoo” control point). “Rigelian” and “Glider” both find the MPD server the 2go runs properly, as well.

  • I am still having issues with Rigelien not handling multi-artists albums correctly, and it is very hit and miss on album-art (bug reports submitted; we’ll see how that goes … others are reporting no issues).

  • Glider, so far, seems to be working without issue, and the multi-artist albums show up correctly, as does album art. So that’s what I’m using for card-based replay so far.

• Card indexing is a slower than I am accustomed to with the DAPs I own, and have had through my hands recently. To be fair, the 2go is building two separate indexes … one for MPD and one for DLNA/UPnP. Indexing ~11,500 FLAC tracks on a 512 GB card took ~15 minutes.

• When indexing, the “2go status LED” (there are three status LEDs: Charge, Network and 2go) rapidly flashes Red, Green, Blue. When it stops flashing, indexing is done. The goFigure app also switches “DLNA Database Status” from “Indexing” to “Idle” (this was not working yesterday … it sat on “Indexing” for several hours).

I have no tried the TIDAL/Qobuz integration in the goFigure app yet.

My primary use case here is still with Roon. It’s extremely nice to have a portable, capable, little full-blown Roon end-point/DAC/amp. No more having to run wires or tolerate Bluetooth.

[Torq]

Using 2go to play from its internal microSDXC card slots is a bit of a trial.

For one thing, you need third-party software to do it at all. And for another, it’s not the most streamlined experience even then. A far cry from any modern DAP.

2go has two card slots, but you have to manually switch between them in Chord’s “2go” app. Player applications are not really natively aware of this, so how they respond to switching cards and the necessary indexing is a bit of a crap shoot.

“Glider” gets a bit upset when you do this; “Rigelian” handles is better.

…

Cover/album art is also a bit of a crapshoot …

“Glider” reads it directly from the individual music files/folders pretty reliably. “Rigelian” can’t read from the raw files, and 2go doesn’t expose “Folder.jpg” filers, so there you either need to have your cover art as “Cover.jpg” files or rely on art-lookup via Discogs or Musizcbrainz, neither of which has useful coverage for my personal library.

ALL of my music either has purely embedded cover art, and/or Folder.jpg files. To make “Rigelian” see this, it’s necessary to create “Cover.jpg” copies of those files. So I created a little Python script to sort all that out.

If you want the script, and are familiar with Python, scripts, etc. PM me. I am not providing any support on it (so don’t ask … ).

[Torq]

The lovely weather here finally proved enough to have me tear myself away from the HSA-1a, venture outside, and spend some more time with the 2go/Hugo 2 combination (with the MySphere 3.2 today).

A couple of functional updates:

Rigelian

Berrie, the author of this software, responded very quickly to my “bug” report regarding multi-artist albums. The fix was to fill in the “Album Artist” values for compliation/multi-artist albums to a common value for all tracks on such an album (e.g. “Various” or “Various Artists”) … as “NULL” or not having the field set, doesn’t work as a common value here.

This makes sense, even if every other player/server/client/device I have will group purely by the Album name in this case. But it’s an easy fix, and now it’s done, so that is working correctly, and Berrie’s responsiveness was impressive (was well under 24 hours).

The cover-art issue was resolved by making sure every album folder has a Cover.jpg file as well (see afore-mentioned script to accomplish this). However, until the covers have been cached, Rigelian will either show no cover or pull from an online source (Musicbrainz or Discogs).

BUT … this is now how I am driving the 2go/Hugo 2 for SD-card playback.

–

Roon

2go has been FLAWLESS driven from Roon, even if the unit does not show as “Roon Certified”. And at home, this will be my preferred way to use the unit.

DLNA/UPnP

This has been almost flawless driven from my standard DLNA/UPnP servers and control points (which I’ve had in place for years, as that’s the “native” mode for my main Linn speaker rig, even if I mostly drive it via Roon now).

SD-card Replay

SD-card replay (which still requires an external/third-party app, like Rigelian) is not as smooth.

There are lots of little, inconsistent/occaisional issues here.

The two card slots are treated independently. You have to manually switch between them in the goFigure app. Doing so works, but your player application may have issues with the change.

Glider will tend to leave all albums visible, but show a “Music Offline” message if the one you try and play isn’t on the card you have selected. Rigelian behaves a bit better here, but can still get lost and then winds up needing to be terminated, ITs database update, and then you can go play again.

SD-Cards in General

Its best to make sure nothing is going on with one card slot before doing anything with the other. For example, sometimes inserting a second card, if the first is indexing or being played from, will cause the 2go to lose its mind and go into a “indexing forever” state - at which point you’re manually resetting the thing … and starting your indexing over.

Indexing IS slow … yes it’s building two indexes, but still … it’s SLOW. Half the speed, at best, as my DAPs. Over 40 minutes for a ONE full 1TB card …

A couple of times since I got it, it has just decided to re-index a card that hasn’t been touched.

Cards are NOT computer-accessible in the unit, you have to remove them and deal with them in a card-reader.

However, playback from them, once working, is trouble free.

Sound

I still say the 2go improves the audible performance of the Hugo 2. And I’d rather use it via SD-card playback, than via a wired or Bluetooth connection from my phone. It’s a MUCH better experience than Poly was (though Poly should be about the same, now).

[jacobacci]

Chord 2go owner for a few weeks. So far I have used it only connected to Etherent. I agree Hugo2 sounds better through 2go than through its own USB port with an external streamer.
Today I tried to use 2go via WLAN on battery and I must say it was a somewhat frustrating experience.
The issues I encountered:

• Everytime I start the goFigure app, it asks me to re-enter the Wifi password. Shouldn’t 2go connect to a Wifi network I have configured in an earlier session?
• For the life of me I cannot figure out how to use qobuz and tidal. I have entered the user credentials in settings. The music tab only lists radio stations, no qobuz or tidal. Maybe I am simply missing something obvious here
• 2go connects to the WLAN of an ASUS RT-AC66U B1 without issues, but it refuses to see the WLAN (with identical SSID and PWS) on my Swisscom Internet Box 3. All my other pieces of hardware connect tot he Swisscom Box WLAN without any issues

I’d be grateful for any help, as I cannot use 2go otherwise
Thanks a lot

[Torq]

2go has some definite issues when dealing with wireless networks that include more than one access point or interface using the same SSID. It will work with some and not with others.

In some cases it will not work even on a true mesh-network, let alone networks that are using extenders/repeaters or just simple common SSID and password schemes (which technically gives you two separate networks - and is even more of a problem).

That’s what’s causing you to have to re-enter your WiFi password.

There’s no fix/workaround for this presently (short of only having one access point active), though Chord are aware of it.

It does work on my home mesh network, and correctly preserves the access credentials. I have a friend with one where it will only work at all if he turns two of his three mesh devices off.

…

You cannot play TIDAL or Qobuz through the goFigure app.

You enter your login details there for other applications to use, but goFigure itself won’t play them. One application that works for this is “mConnect Player” (there’s probably an Android version, or alternative - I don’t use Android so haven’t looked).

goFigure can’t play content off SD cards either (unless you have playlists built) … it’s really just for configuration.

…

While not nearly as bad as the situation was with Poly … the 2Go definitely has some issues at present.

For me, as a wireless Roon endpoint on my mesh network it has been seamless. Every other mode of operation has had (or still has) issues of some kind (intermittent or otherwise).

[jacobacci]

Hi Ian
Thanks for your super fast reply.
In that case it looks like I did not miss anything. Swisscom Internet Box 3 and the WLAN Box 2 extensions indeed form a mesh network. I will get in touch with the Swiss importer of Chord, so they can look at this issue and relay it back to Chord.

Re Qobuz. I use both iOS and Android, so mconnect is fine. I tried both qobuz and tidal through mconnect and both work. Why Chord makes me enter the credentials in goFigure as well doesn’t really make sense to me. I assume its so the renderer in 2go can access qobuz and tidal. mconnect needs the credentials so the control point can access qobuz and tidal.

The best DLNA control point for android is probably BubbleUPnP

Looks like goFigure does need some more work to make it a straightforward and pleasant experience

[Torq]

The scary thing is that goFigure, even as it is today, is 1000x better than the original experience with Poly … which required sticking pins in holes to do resets, waiting out 20-minute time-out periods, or having to let the unit’s battery totally run down.

So far I don’t think either the 2Go’s firmware, nor goFigure has been updated since the 2Go launched. Which is probably somewhat down to the virus/lockdown stuff people are dealing with.

There are a litany of little things that need to be fixed, and that Chord are aware of.

For most users, at the moment, it comes down to are those issues in the way of using the unit (and if so, I’d return it and wait out the fixes) or not. For me, 95% of its use is as a wireless Roon end-point … and on my network that works flawlessly. If I was doing more SD-card based replay or had a different network I probably would have returned int already.

[jacobacci]

I am actually quite ok with 2go so far. I use it as a streamer in my secondary system. 2go is connected through ethernet, so the WLAN mesh issue does not come into play. Like you I use Roon as my primary UI and that solves the qobuz and tidal issues.
When I travel, I don’t usually encounter mesh networks. So I am ok there as well (most of the time)
However as an engineer I like things to work as advertised … so I do hope Chord comes up with fixes.

[jacobacci]

I just noticed another thing that Chord would need to look at. 2go only accepts DSD up DSD256. I presume this is because they are using some standard Linux Kernel which only supports DoP out of the Box.
I happily stream DSD512 to a Neukomm DAC using Audiolinux. DSD512 even works on the T+A DAC8 DSD after some work by T+A and Amanero. As Chord has all the elements in this equation under their control (Streaming Software, USB Input on Hugo2), this should be a piece of cake for them to fix.
It is really ironic that the higher end solution (2go with Hugo2) which sounds better does not handle DSD512 and a Windows Streamer (using ASIO) with Hugo2 does. I wonder what Chord was thinking.

[gryffe]

I’ve had the 2go for a month now and think it’s a terrific piece of kit. One thing that frustrates me though is it seems to lose it’s network connection fairly regularly, normally after a period of inactivity. I have it hardwired by ethernet cable to router. It becomes evident that it’s not recognised by the network when Roon doesn’t see it in list of audio devices, and then when I check Go Figure app it is not recognised there either. It is always sorted by doing a reboot of the 2go, but that’s not ideal long term. Anybody else experienced this?

Oh and the 2go and Hugo 2 get incredibly warm while charging, even when not playing at same time. At least twice now the units have switched off due to heat. Seems less heat when charging USB to USB rather than main charger, but obviously this is a slower way to charge, so would prefer to use charger instead but a bit concerned that the heat generated using this method might cause long term damage to units.

Cheers

[gryffe]

On the subject of the 2go/Hugo getting too warm, somebody on another site recommended this piece of supporting kit as a remedy. He says it stops the 2go/Hugo2 overheating. Have ordered and will report back.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=B07B94RYZ4&ref=nb_sb_noss

If the link is still not working - if you search " Tincogo (2 Pack) Adjustable Iron Display Stand Easel Foldable Tablet" once you are on Amazon this will find it.

[Torq]

Your link goes to a generic Amazon front-page.

What headphones/IEMS are you trying to drive while charging the 2Go/Hugo 2 pair? If they’re low impedance it might be an issue. I’ve not had my units shut down due to heat yet. Though I tend to have my 2Go/Hugo 2 in “desktop” mode most of the time these days (so it’s not really charging while playing).

[gryffe]

Hi cheers for pointing out the error with the link. Have edited the post, hopefully works now.

I’m using Sennheiser HD800S headphones for portable listening. I also connect to my Arcam SA30 amp using RCA cables for daytime listening on my hifi.

On your point about “desktop” mode. Given it requires charging to take place for 24 hours I will get round to this one day, but I normally unplug it at some point during the day to move around the house.

[gryffe]

@Torq

I’ve not had my units shut down due to heat yet. Though I tend to have my 2Go/Hugo 2 in “desktop” mode most of the time these days (so it’s not really charging while playing).

@Torq - Don’t think I’ve quite grasped what “desktop” mode is yet.
Stab in the dark - Do you keep the charger plugged in, and the Hugo is then only charged till full power, and then stops charging?

Probably miles off lol