This is a review and detailed measurements of the Chord Huei phono stage/pre-amplifier. It was kindly sent to me by a member. The Huei costs US $1,495.
The Huei is one of the most exquisite and nicest implementation of the Chord design language:
The unit weighs a ton and feels like excellently machined and finished piece of desktop audio. The back is even prettier than the front:
The shiny RCA jacks look and feel like jewelry. And I love the inclusion of the balanced XLR output to help reduce impact of noise and hum that RCA connections bring.
Despite all of the above, the functional design of the Huei is a total fail! If you are familiar with Chord products you know that they use colored LEDs to communicate the status of some setting. That makes the device difficult to operate due to the need to then remember the color of the button meaning different things. Here, that design has been taken to level of insanity with many settings encoded into colors. Take the impedance settings for moving magnet mode. These are the color indicators:
Are they crazy? Who the heck remembers these colors? No, you don't just set it and forget it. You can touch a button by accident and have it be a different impedance and you would not know it. They give you a cheat sheet that is tiny and definite proof of user interface fail.
Gain settings are not as numerous but you still have 7 or 8 to remember.
If you are going to have a microprocessor, why not have a proper display indicating what is going on? The whole design theses was a mistake to being with and now it is absurdly bad.
Chord Huei Measurements
Let's start with our usual dashboard using my preferred XLR Output with gain set similarly to other phono stages:
Whoa. What happened here? That low frequency noise is hugely high and is setting SINAD to its dismal value. You would think with high noise distortion can be hidden but even that is bad enough to show up as second and third harmonics. Teasing the two aspects apart we get:
Good grief. Using the sum SINAD in our ranking, the Huei finishes dead last:
Thought maybe balanced output has a problem so I measured RCA out and got the same response:
Here is the spectrum of noise with no input signal (but terminated):
The Huei is an incredible 45 dB worse in noise department than bargain Emotiva XPS-1. The Emotiva costs less than 10% of Huei!
Sadly there is more bad news. Here is the frequency response:
What is with peaking high frequencies? The error goes up to 1.2 dB at 20 kHz but company says they comply to ±0.1 dB?
No, we are not done. There is a rumble filter but it does absolutely nothing!
I tested this multiple times and even powered the unit on and off and it still does nothing. The switch goes from off to white as documented but nothing happens as far as filtering. Company says it starts to roll off from 50 Hz.
Edit: Looks like the rumble filter is not just a high-pass so disregard the above.
The only blessing here is good bit of headroom:
Interesting that the MC mode with its higher gain has much lower noise (although still bad). The lower input impedance may be helping there.
Conclusions
It is hard to imagine a phono stage being broken in so many aspects then the Chord Huei. Almost unusable interface. Huge amount of noise and fair bit of distortion. RIAA equalization that is not accurate, nor spec compliant. And Rumble filter that does nothing. The only thing it has going for it is that it is pretty!
Can't imagine a company like Chord producing something like this (other than the UI). They are known for needlessly overengineered DACs but otherwise performance is excellent. Not so here.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Chord Huei in any form or fashion. In my opinion it should be pulled from the market and redesigned.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The Huei is one of the most exquisite and nicest implementation of the Chord design language:
The unit weighs a ton and feels like excellently machined and finished piece of desktop audio. The back is even prettier than the front:
The shiny RCA jacks look and feel like jewelry. And I love the inclusion of the balanced XLR output to help reduce impact of noise and hum that RCA connections bring.
Despite all of the above, the functional design of the Huei is a total fail! If you are familiar with Chord products you know that they use colored LEDs to communicate the status of some setting. That makes the device difficult to operate due to the need to then remember the color of the button meaning different things. Here, that design has been taken to level of insanity with many settings encoded into colors. Take the impedance settings for moving magnet mode. These are the color indicators:
Are they crazy? Who the heck remembers these colors? No, you don't just set it and forget it. You can touch a button by accident and have it be a different impedance and you would not know it. They give you a cheat sheet that is tiny and definite proof of user interface fail.
Gain settings are not as numerous but you still have 7 or 8 to remember.
If you are going to have a microprocessor, why not have a proper display indicating what is going on? The whole design theses was a mistake to being with and now it is absurdly bad.
Chord Huei Measurements
Let's start with our usual dashboard using my preferred XLR Output with gain set similarly to other phono stages:
Whoa. What happened here? That low frequency noise is hugely high and is setting SINAD to its dismal value. You would think with high noise distortion can be hidden but even that is bad enough to show up as second and third harmonics. Teasing the two aspects apart we get:
Good grief. Using the sum SINAD in our ranking, the Huei finishes dead last:
Thought maybe balanced output has a problem so I measured RCA out and got the same response:
Here is the spectrum of noise with no input signal (but terminated):
The Huei is an incredible 45 dB worse in noise department than bargain Emotiva XPS-1. The Emotiva costs less than 10% of Huei!
Sadly there is more bad news. Here is the frequency response:
What is with peaking high frequencies? The error goes up to 1.2 dB at 20 kHz but company says they comply to ±0.1 dB?
No, we are not done. There is a rumble filter but it does absolutely nothing!
I tested this multiple times and even powered the unit on and off and it still does nothing. The switch goes from off to white as documented but nothing happens as far as filtering. Company says it starts to roll off from 50 Hz.
Edit: Looks like the rumble filter is not just a high-pass so disregard the above.
The only blessing here is good bit of headroom:
Interesting that the MC mode with its higher gain has much lower noise (although still bad). The lower input impedance may be helping there.
Conclusions
It is hard to imagine a phono stage being broken in so many aspects then the Chord Huei. Almost unusable interface. Huge amount of noise and fair bit of distortion. RIAA equalization that is not accurate, nor spec compliant. And Rumble filter that does nothing. The only thing it has going for it is that it is pretty!
Can't imagine a company like Chord producing something like this (other than the UI). They are known for needlessly overengineered DACs but otherwise performance is excellent. Not so here.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Chord Huei in any form or fashion. In my opinion it should be pulled from the market and redesigned.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Last edited: