The Chord presentation, press session and product announcement are underway in Munich …
For headphone purposes, the interesting product announcement is an all-new Hugo 2 TT (a table-top version of Hugo). This is a fairly significant departure from the direction they went with the original Hugo TT. That was pretty much a Hugo in a new case with more power on tap, galvanic isolation and an interesting internally battery power supply.
The Hugo 2 TT has a super-cap based internal PSU, retains the galvanic isolation, but offers double the filter length in the first upsample that Hugo 2 does. Too early to say what this will do for the sound, but generally the WTA filter has improved with tap-length.
And the power output available is significant … enough to drive efficient speakers directly, which should bode well when using more demanding cans (not sure how much of that power is available at the headphone output, but you could always run from the XLR outputs directly if they’re capable of driving speakers).
The press release/materials are here.