Musickid, Tidal is the culprit. The last update to Tidal's application on the Mac appears to have broken exclusive mode with Chord dacs. I'm using a Mojo and within the same day it went from working fine to sounding distant and distorted (after the restart for the app update). Other Chord users are reporting identical problems. You can can confirm that it's Tidal and not your Hugo 2 by finding an MQA track and playing it. It should sound fine, even in exclusive mode. It's "just" playback of non-MQA tracks that Tidal managed to break in this last update.