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Hegel H95 Review (Streaming Amplifier)

Bouteille

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The Opera Consonance A100. Opera (used to?) build the Hegel amps.
I think you are correct, but looking at the pictures again it seems the global layout is similar but not the actual circuitry... Sorry if I added to the confusion :)
 

Geert

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I think you are correct, but looking at the pictures again it seems the global layout is similar but not the actual circuitry... Sorry if I added to the confusion :)
It's not complete similar of course. They share the same chassis and some other components. A matter of cost optimisation. Otherwise it's difficult to build a 2k amplifier o_O
 

Billy Budapest

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actually hegel has been around for a long time. i was at a private lecture held by the founder Bent Holter over 15 years ago.
They must have had limited distribution, then, because they burst on the scene out of nowhere about five years ago, looking like Primare ripoffs.
 

calugg

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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:
View attachment 167912

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:
View attachment 167913

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:

View attachment 167914

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:
View attachment 167915
When sweeping IMD distortion level, we can see part of the problem:

View attachment 167916

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:

View attachment 167917

This is horrid performance in any modern DAC.

Back to distortion, we see that again in multitone test:

View attachment 167918

Jitter performance is lackluster and what I would expect to see from random ebay DAC:

View attachment 167919

To finish our suffering, here is poor linearity measurement:
View attachment 167920

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:

View attachment 167921

Noise and distortion is just above average:
View attachment 167922

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:


View attachment 167923

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:

View attachment 167924

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:

View attachment 167925

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:

View attachment 167926

Frequency response is flat in audible band:

View attachment 167931

Power output is just 63 watts into 4 ohm at the knee of the distortion curve:
View attachment 167927

Allowing for more distortion and busting sharply increased available power:
View attachment 167929

Power into 8 ohm is very low for this expensive of an amplifier:
View attachment 167930

Checking for frequency dependency we see something limiting power before the amplifier naturally doing so:

View attachment 167932

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:

View attachment 167933

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:


View attachment 167934

The guarantee reason is high output impedance and that is precisely what we have:


View attachment 167935

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.

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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/
I hope you can make a video based on these data. As others have pointed out, the Hegel fanboys are going to need a support group. That said, these amps didn't appeal to me because (1) price and (2) weight. As I am moving into the "little old lady" stage of life, I do NOT need to play with super-heavy audio equipment, particularly if the results are not worth my efforts.
 

Sonny1

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Man, I’m relieved on this one. When all the internet reviewers and guys in the usual online groups were gushing over Hegel a few years back, I took home an integrated amp/DAC, to test. I love the look, like a higher end version of NAD, and the price was reasonable. The unit I tested was complete crap, although I still love the looks, and I would up returning it. I didn’t measure it because I don’t have the equipment or skill but it sounded flat and generally blah in my system. I played with it for a week before throwing in the towel.

I was disappointed with the performance but never regretted sending it back. Glad to see my ears weren’t completely wrong. Still love the looks but agree the design was junk.
 

caught gesture

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Hegel have backed themselves into a corner with their comments on this thread. By stating they focus heavily on testing and that it is a priority, they are going to find it hard to justify releasing such a product at this price point. If they state that reviewers have been impressed by listening to the amp (and therefore the tests done here are not indicative of its performance to the consumer), it will contradict their position vis-a-vis scientific measurements. It’s a mess either way. They need to get to work on the obvious improvements needed.
 
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Another thing that sucks about this amp is the very low voltage preouts. I had to add a separate preamp to get sufficient signal to my sub.

(The amp reviewed is mine, BTW.)

Regrets… a mistake I can afford, begrudgingly.
Just sell it at a loss and get something proper
 

ackata45

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An essay on INTELLIGENCE from the manufacturer
-------------------------------------------------------


"........The measure of INTELLIGENCE is the ability to CHANGE, said Albert Einstein. With the H95 we believe we have done this statement justice. The H95 is indeed an intelligent purchase.

But what is intelligent today is not necessarily intelligent tomorrow.

While connectivity and upgradability are important, it is on the inside where the H95 really showcases its intelligence.

That is why we have equipped the H95 with a Digital-to-analog converter of the highest quality - making the change from digital to analog in a very intelligent way. With technology crafted from the ground up and in-house by the Hegel team, we take full control of the digital data stream.

Add to this our patented SoundEngine2 technology and you really get something spectacular. The technology reduces signal distortion to levels almost immeasurable and makes certain you totally immerse yourself in your music or your movies.

Changing up to Hegel's cool design and signature sound quality, with a host of inputs and playback possibilities, will allow you to build an amazing multi-talented system. That is intelligence......"

----------------------------------------------------------

So, who is insulting our intelligence, Amir or the manufacturer ?!:oops:
 

Azathoth

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is rolling in his grave.
 

Lambda

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Signal-to-noise ratio: More than 100 dB
Crosstalk: Less than -100 dB
Distortion: Less than 0.01% @ 25 W/8 Ω/1 kHz
Intermodulation: Less than 0.01% (19 kHz + 20 kHz)
Damping factor: More than 2000 (main power output stage)

73410868.jpg
 

bkrmar

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What @Hegel Music System will not say in public is that H95 was designed for this level of performance. It was designed for people who have this kind of money to spend on amp but are not into ultimate sound performance and usually listen to Spotify level sound quality (which is 95% of people basically). This is why there is no Roon as it is a niche software but only AirPlay and Spotify Connect.

Also, Hegel needs to leave space in sound quality terms to higher end devices in the range.

Overpriced? Depends on the amount of money you have. But most likely it is in general.

H95 is not high end solution for sound quality, it is just a premium conumer grade hi-fi product and needs to be considered as such.

Dont hate the player (Hegel), hate the game.
 

NHL99

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There's some IP stated

Organic Sound - a bit vague
Sound Engine - 'local error canceling system'
DualAmp - separates volt and current?
DualPower - two power supplies
LineDriver - high-frequency noise removed from the analog signal
MasterClock - anti-jitter
SyncroDac - anti-jitter
USB - computer sound card built-in
Optimized Clock -optimal sampling frequency for the DAC implementation?

One could optimistically imagine that all these brand specific solutions would mean that the foundation was sound.


Listened to a Hegel H120 paired to B&W 704 S2 playing Rolling Stones not long ago. Kind of liked the presentation, there was clear separation between left and right speaker. Far too much money, while it wasn't unpleasant in any way.
 

Ron Texas

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Another big name product from a brand beloved by the subjective crowd bites the dust. Thank you @amirm
 

ROOSKIE

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For me it’s around -100dB THD+N. Others may disagree, but I can clearly hear the difference between an amp with -108dB THD+N and -92dB THD+N. And can tell them apart blind 10 out of 10 times.
Hmmm,
With all sincerity I think you would need to document the test and processes in a very detailed way before I or anyone ought to beleive you on this.
 
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