Chord DAC is tank proof!

When you’re shopping for a DAC you probably have a shopping list of features in mind. I dare to bet that, on no occasion, have you added being impervious to tanks to that list.

Portable DAC/headphone amps have to put up with a little bit of the rough stuff when compared to their lounge-loving stablemates. Being taken to and from the office, being used in hotel rooms, being packed and unpacked. This, of course, has to be kept in mind by the makers.

It seems that Chord went one, or many, steps beyond this as they were more than happy to pit its lovely £1,400 DAC and headphone amp, the Hugo, against a tank.

The tank in question is a Russian-built BMP-1, which features radiation shielding and weighs 13 tonnes. It’s also capable of carrying 11 people and can be used to cross rivers, thanks to some handily-placed flotation devices.

As you may have read on GadgetyNews before, the Chord Hugo sounds fantastic as well as looking gorgeous.

The Hugo comes loaded with four digital inputs, it supports Bluetooth and can output to three sets of headphones in one go. All of that with the all-important fact that it supports high-resolution audio at 384khz as well as the DSD 128 format. Oh, and I now have to add that it can take on tanks.

This is not the first time those crazy folk at Chord have tested its tech with tanks. In 2011 the company let its flagship DAC, the QBD76 go head-to-head with a T55 tank, and it managed to survive too.

Watch the video and, even though the Hugo doesn’t come away completely unscathed, it certain fairs better than most of my Hi-fi gear would.

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