Chord 2go / 2yu:
It isn’t clear when enjoying music turns into being an audiophile. Is it when you decide you want the bass to be like it was in the club? Or when you spend more on gear than music? When someone admits they like buying, comparing, collecting or owning electronics more than listening to music, does that make them an audiophile?
The Chord 2go / 2yu exists outside of the mainstream. IT only makes sense in a niche of a niche of a niche, or possibly, it just doesn’t make any sense for anyone. It is the sort of product that can raise deep existential questions about what we are doing with our money, simply by existing. It is perhaps even a disturbing product, if you’re the type to ruminate over whisky.
But, we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with “What the fc is this thing”
The Chord 2go and 2yu are two separate products in the “Hugo” range. The Hugo range indicates a certain size for compatibility of different components. If you’re in a Cartoon Network mood, you might compare it to Voltron, where you keep buying pieces to combine them into bigger better pieces and smaller sub assemblies.
- The Hugo 2 ($2795) is a portable DAC amp.
- The 2go ($1495) attaches to either the Hugo2 or the 2yu, and adds streaming and micro sd card storage to either.
- The 2yu ($745 MSRP) attaches to the 2go to add digital outputs and buttons, since the 2go depends on the Hugo2 buttons.
All three pieces are available in silver or black.
Set up is fairly easy. So you install some pins on the 2yu, slide the 2go over them, and tighten down some Allen screw to keep the two docked. Fire up the Chord app to get the thing onto your network, and after that, it works like any other screen less streamer. You can Roon, you can DLNA, you can swap outputs, and mute.
In use, the 2go/2yu combo works, errrr, fine? I have a review sample that has been around the block, so some of her quirks might be damage, rather than Chord being Chord. For example, the power button does not turn it on and off. There is no battery in either piece, so it has to remain plugged in at all times, with the standard Chord Hugo four lit balls glowing from your equipment rack. They can be dimmed, but it feels like the power button should do something.
The sound is clean. Squeaky clean. Absolutely unremarkable. As a streamer should be. There may be people that can tell a difference between this and a Pi2Aes, but they’d be earning their pay that day. In use, they are indistinguishable from each other, accurately reproducing the tunes fed to them. The Chord had no drop outs, only one or two stutters, and just ticked away, to the point where it was easy to forget which streamer was in use at any given time.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. A pi2aes and pi4 with case and power supply and cost around $400-$500 dollars, and require a small amount of DIY capability. A iFi Zen Stream is $399. A Bluesound Node 2 is $599. A Cambridge CXN V2 is $1100 and has a screen and remote. The Cambridge Azur 851N is $1450 and has a screen and remote. The Chord combo is $2250. You can buy an integrated streaming amplifier for less than that. A good one!
And that’s the end of the story for me. In a/b testing with a pi2aes running into the back of a Chord TT2, I struggled to hear audible change from one bnc input to the next. Let alone a difference that would justify 2x, 3x or 5x the price. Maybe this is one of those slow burn pieces, where you need to have it in place for months to retroactively understand the audible difference when it comes out of the system, but it was only here a week and a half. And it won’t be missed then it is boxed up.
So who is this for? The well heeled Chord Fanboy. Sorry. Chord’s quirkiness is one of their most lovable attributes (or hate-able), their build quality is usually superb, their brand vision is fantastically well realized. But this, this is a design exercise that should have been stopped. These resources should have gone elsewhere in the company. This is just a very expensive, not incredibly feature loaded streamer. If you already own a Hugo2 and a 2go, this still costs more than a Node 2i, a Pi2Aes, and iFi Zen stream and for that matter, a dedicated Mac mini hooked straight to your dac.
So, then. Knowing that an audiophile is a niche of music lovers, and that streaming audiophiles is a niche of audiophiles and that Chord Hugo2 ecosystem dwellers are a niche of audiophiles, then we are down to a Venn diagram of vanishingly small overlap. If you own everything else, and like the idea of a streamer add on for your Hugo2, it doesn’t worse than your other choices. If you are a gear collector, then it is an interesting curiosity, impossible to get from any other company. And if you are still wondering who the 2go/2yu combination is for, it is not for you.