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Editors' Choice Award 2024 – The Absolute Sound Magazine
Editors' Choice Award 2022 – The Absolute Sound Magazine
Unrivaled Clarity and Musicality
As Chord Electronics celebrates its 30th anniversary, the company is proudly launching the Huei phono preamp, offering MM/MC compatibility, integrating turntables to amplifiers with unrivalled clarity and musicality. Entirely conceived, engineered and manufactured in Great Britain, Huei has been carefully designed to provide turntables with the same high standards of amplification that for which Chord Electronics has become known for over the past 30 years.
Award-Winning Performance
The Absolute Sound magazine honored the Chord Huei with an Editors' Choice Award for 2024 and 2022.
"The Chord Huei is a compact black rectangle, with four glowing lights bumped up along the front that control loading options. The Huei includes gain steps from 49dB up to 70dB with six total stops in between for the mc section, and 21dB to 42dB with six stops for the mm section. Loading allows for 100 ohms up to 3700 ohms for mc, and 47k ohms for mm. Sonically, the low end is solid and the mids very smooth; the overall presentation is on the warm end of the spectrum."
"The Last Phono Stage You’ll Ever Need or Want"
"The Chord Huei phono preamp delivers so much performance from your favorite cartridge that you may swear off digital," reports ecoustics.com, August 1, 2021. "If that is what you’re looking for in vinyl playback, the Chord Huei is a good place to start. And, I think, a good place to stop. This just might be the last phono stage you’ll ever need or want."
"The Huei’s appeal extends all the way from its rock-solid build and playfully colourful, sphere-based control and communication system to its impressive knack of extracting the best from a turntable/cartridge combo without being too painfully honest about the ropier aspects of a less-than-pristine recording," notes Hi-Fi Choice, March 11, 2021.
"The Huei is all about the excitement, but without being either so brightly lit or so overly excitable and detailed that it leaves you cold," observes Alan Sircom, Hi-Fi+, July 28, 2020.
Comprehensive Compatibility
Benefitting from its ability to excel with both moving magnet and moving coil phono cartridges, Huei offers wide compatibility with a huge range of cartridges, thanks to comprehensive gain and impedance-matching options. Huei’s high-gain and low-gain switching settings are easily accessible via the front-panel controls, introducing welcome flexibility.
Huei’s advanced design offers (for the first time in a Chord Electronics phono preamp) ultra-low-noise microprocessor control of its main features, including a convenient memory function. With multiple options for impedance-matching, seven-stage switchable gain and a switchable rumble filter, Huei’s design not only offers comprehensive compatibility, but you have the advantage of experimenting with different settings for the best sonic performance from your favorite cartridges.
The input impedance for moving coil phono cartridges is adjustable from 30Ω to 47kΩ in twelve selectable steps. Input impedance for moving magnet cartridges is fixed at 47kΩ. The gain setting for moving coil cartridges is selectable in eight steps between 48dB and 70dB, while the gain for moving magnet cartridges is selectable in eight steps between 25dB and 35dB.
Precision-Machined and Beautifully Appointed
Precision-machined from solid aircraft-grade aluminum billet and beautifully appointed, Huei has a similar form factor to the company’s Qutest DAC and also offers a top-mounted viewing window into the illuminated electronics within. The design also shares the same polychromatic control spheres the company has become known for in its digital products. The illuminated front-panel spheres offer direct access to Huei’s gain and impedance settings, selection for MM/MC cartridges, and access to the defeatable on-board rumble filter.
Huei is a stylish, practical and high-performance solution for integrating turntables into Chord Electronics’ (and other) systems. For maximum flexibility and compatibility with high-end amplifiers, Huei features both balanced (RCA) and unbalanced outputs (XLR) with RCA inputs. A high-quality, low-noise 12-volt external power supply is included.
"Too Good for the Money"
"Would I recommend this Chord Huei to an audiophile looking for a phono stage in this price range? You bet I would. I would also recommend it to an audiophile looking for a phono stage in a price range that is above the Huei's asking price," reports Tom Lyle, Enjoy the Music, January 2020.
"On every metric I can think of, it seems too good for the money – it is built superbly, has a versatile feature set, a sophisticated and distinctive user interface and also sounds a blast," raves David Price, StereoNET Australia, November 28, 2019. "If you like hearing your LP records as nature intended, then right now Bartlett's new baby is the best you can do on a reasonable budget."
