This is a review and detailed measurements of the Hegel H95 integrated amplifier with DAC and streaming support. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $2000.
The H95 looks pretty nice:
I really like the large, high resolution and very responsive graphic display. What I don't like is the absence of power button on the front face. After some research I found out it is on the bottom. I realize without it there is symmetry but the one or two times that you play something super loud and want to rush to shut it off, you will hate the fact that it will take some effort to reach under to power it down. Another thing I didn't like is lack of acceleration on volume control. You have to crank and crank it to turn it all the way up and down.
The back panel shows the extra connectively over a standard analog amplifier:
Very nice to see built-in DAC and Ethernet streaming. What is not is the maximum supported sample rate of 96 kHz over USB. This tells me they are using ancient and obsolete USB interface. They say they did this for ease of design and to save money to put toward making the DAC itself better. We will see about that.
A simple plastic remote control is provided which is very similar to what we see from Chinese desktop manufacturers. I tend to like it but it is unusual for such an expensive product to come with this kind of remote. Usually they include some heavy but harder to use remote.
Hegel H95 DAC Measurements
This being an amplifier, I immediately jumped to measuring that part of it first. But then I had to backtrack when I noticed digital input performance was worse than analog. Given the line out, I decided to measure the DAC using coax input. For some reason, like a Hegel DAC I tested in the past, my ASIO4ALL interface would not see the USB input so I decided to test with Coax. Here is our dashboard with volume control adjusted to produce the nominal 2 volts:
I don't need to tell you that this is stunning high level of distortion, landing the H95 seven from the bottom list of some 350 DACs tested:
When sweeping IMD distortion level, we can see part of the problem:
This is something we see in Audio/Video receivers where they set the optimal gain to drive their amplifiers and not the 2 volts we are looking for. Even then performance is not good, barely showing less noise than a $9 phone dongle! We can measure the noise itself:
This is horrid performance in any modern DAC.
Back to distortion, we see that again in multitone test:
Jitter performance is lackluster and what I would expect to see from random ebay DAC:
To finish our suffering, here is poor linearity measurement:
I think they may have unseated Schiit with their multibit DACs and poor linearity!
Really, really bad showing.
Hegel H95 Amplifier Measurements
I first started with line in and adjusted the volume to get the nominal gain of 29 dB we use in integrated amplifier tests:
Noise and distortion is just above average:
I expected a lot better as the company's claim to fame is a comparator which supposedly detects distortion and sends an inverted signal to the amp to correct. We see plenty of amplifiers without such circuit performing far better as you can see in above graph. And of course we have products that use true feed forward technology such as Benchmark AHB2 currently occupying #1 spot in above graph.
What's more, there are stability issues with that circuit (my guess). Check out the warm up performance of this amplifier:
I have never seen anything like this. Variations are quite large (as much as 3 dB) with two very large spikes. It never stabilized even though I let it warm up far longer than other amps to tune of 17 minutes. Best case performance was actually when the amplifier was just powered on at 80.5 dB SIAND but then finishing at 79.5.
Switching to DAC input which one would hope would eliminate source of external noise made things worse, not better in that regard:
You are losing 9 dB in SINAD due to much higher noise floor. Why or why? Again, AV receivers do this but I don't think I have measured this kind of degradation before when using digital input.
So from here on I focused on analog input. Here is our dynamic range:
I like to see 96 dB at 5 watts but 91 is fine. The max power performance doesn't improve much because this is not a very powerful amplifier.
Crosstalk is also good:
Frequency response is flat in audible band:
Power output is just 63 watts into 4 ohm at the knee of the distortion curve:
Allowing for more distortion and busting sharply increased available power:
Power into 8 ohm is very low for this expensive of an amplifier:
Checking for frequency dependency we see something limiting power before the amplifier naturally doing so:
Hegel H95 Headphone Amplifier
I usually don't bother testing headphone output on this type of amplifier as it is usually an afterthought. But company talks about improving its output and noise level relative to prior products so I decided to test it some. Here is our power curve into 300 ohm:
I like to see 100 milliwatts of power here and 80 is close enough. Switching to low impedance, we should get a lot more power but we do not:
The guarantee reason is high output impedance and that is precisely what we have:
I am amazed that in this day and age companies like Hegel are not aware of the fact that high impedance is bad for many headphones (changes their tonality) and that even budget headphone amps have impedance below 1 ohm. 77 ohm is just out of the question.
Conclusions
Let's quickly agree that both the DAC and headphone amplifiers are junk. They are better off leaving both out. You can do better with hundreds of products that cost the same as the shipping or tax of the H95. I watched one video where the youtuber said he preferred the sound of Hegel DAC to his Chord Mojo in some ways. Wonder what he thinks now.
The amplifier in H95 is good as far as noise and distortion but nothing to write home about. Continuous power is very low for an amplifier costing $2000 however.
This is just a bad attempt all around.
I can't see any reason to recommend Hegel H95. Company needs to go back to the drawing board and design performant DACs and headphone amplifiers as a minimum. On amplification, they are being left behind by proper feedforward designs and excellent class D with tons of power.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The H95 looks pretty nice:
I really like the large, high resolution and very responsive graphic display. What I don't like is the absence of power button on the front face. After some research I found out it is on the bottom. I realize without it there is symmetry but the one or two times that you play something super loud and want to rush to shut it off, you will hate the fact that it will take some effort to reach under to power it down. Another thing I didn't like is lack of acceleration on volume control. You have to crank and crank it to turn it all the way up and down.
The back panel shows the extra connectively over a standard analog amplifier:
Very nice to see built-in DAC and Ethernet streaming. What is not is the maximum supported sample rate of 96 kHz over USB. This tells me they are using ancient and obsolete USB interface. They say they did this for ease of design and to save money to put toward making the DAC itself better. We will see about that.
A simple plastic remote control is provided which is very similar to what we see from Chinese desktop manufacturers. I tend to like it but it is unusual for such an expensive product to come with this kind of remote. Usually they include some heavy but harder to use remote.
Hegel H95 DAC Measurements
This being an amplifier, I immediately jumped to measuring that part of it first. But then I had to backtrack when I noticed digital input performance was worse than analog. Given the line out, I decided to measure the DAC using coax input. For some reason, like a Hegel DAC I tested in the past, my ASIO4ALL interface would not see the USB input so I decided to test with Coax. Here is our dashboard with volume control adjusted to produce the nominal 2 volts:
I don't need to tell you that this is stunning high level of distortion, landing the H95 seven from the bottom list of some 350 DACs tested:
When sweeping IMD distortion level, we can see part of the problem:
This is something we see in Audio/Video receivers where they set the optimal gain to drive their amplifiers and not the 2 volts we are looking for. Even then performance is not good, barely showing less noise than a $9 phone dongle! We can measure the noise itself:
This is horrid performance in any modern DAC.
Back to distortion, we see that again in multitone test:
Jitter performance is lackluster and what I would expect to see from random ebay DAC:
To finish our suffering, here is poor linearity measurement:
I think they may have unseated Schiit with their multibit DACs and poor linearity!
Really, really bad showing.
Hegel H95 Amplifier Measurements
I first started with line in and adjusted the volume to get the nominal gain of 29 dB we use in integrated amplifier tests:
Noise and distortion is just above average:
I expected a lot better as the company's claim to fame is a comparator which supposedly detects distortion and sends an inverted signal to the amp to correct. We see plenty of amplifiers without such circuit performing far better as you can see in above graph. And of course we have products that use true feed forward technology such as Benchmark AHB2 currently occupying #1 spot in above graph.
What's more, there are stability issues with that circuit (my guess). Check out the warm up performance of this amplifier:
I have never seen anything like this. Variations are quite large (as much as 3 dB) with two very large spikes. It never stabilized even though I let it warm up far longer than other amps to tune of 17 minutes. Best case performance was actually when the amplifier was just powered on at 80.5 dB SIAND but then finishing at 79.5.
Switching to DAC input which one would hope would eliminate source of external noise made things worse, not better in that regard:
You are losing 9 dB in SINAD due to much higher noise floor. Why or why? Again, AV receivers do this but I don't think I have measured this kind of degradation before when using digital input.
So from here on I focused on analog input. Here is our dynamic range:
I like to see 96 dB at 5 watts but 91 is fine. The max power performance doesn't improve much because this is not a very powerful amplifier.
Crosstalk is also good:
Frequency response is flat in audible band:
Power output is just 63 watts into 4 ohm at the knee of the distortion curve:
Allowing for more distortion and busting sharply increased available power:
Power into 8 ohm is very low for this expensive of an amplifier:
Checking for frequency dependency we see something limiting power before the amplifier naturally doing so:
Hegel H95 Headphone Amplifier
I usually don't bother testing headphone output on this type of amplifier as it is usually an afterthought. But company talks about improving its output and noise level relative to prior products so I decided to test it some. Here is our power curve into 300 ohm:
I like to see 100 milliwatts of power here and 80 is close enough. Switching to low impedance, we should get a lot more power but we do not:
The guarantee reason is high output impedance and that is precisely what we have:
I am amazed that in this day and age companies like Hegel are not aware of the fact that high impedance is bad for many headphones (changes their tonality) and that even budget headphone amps have impedance below 1 ohm. 77 ohm is just out of the question.
Conclusions
Let's quickly agree that both the DAC and headphone amplifiers are junk. They are better off leaving both out. You can do better with hundreds of products that cost the same as the shipping or tax of the H95. I watched one video where the youtuber said he preferred the sound of Hegel DAC to his Chord Mojo in some ways. Wonder what he thinks now.
The amplifier in H95 is good as far as noise and distortion but nothing to write home about. Continuous power is very low for an amplifier costing $2000 however.
This is just a bad attempt all around.
I can't see any reason to recommend Hegel H95. Company needs to go back to the drawing board and design performant DACs and headphone amplifiers as a minimum. On amplification, they are being left behind by proper feedforward designs and excellent class D with tons of power.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/