HEGEL H30A > Review in SoundStage!Hi-Fi

It's huge!

Why am I gushing like this? I don’t normally gush. But it’s relevant to this review. For a short time, I slid my Bryston 4B3 back in place of the H30A, and the system promptly lost some of that magic. Don’t get me wrong! The Bryston is a superb amp, one I’ll likely keep until my wife feeds me to the polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba (she tells me she’ll do this if I get unmanageable in my later years). But over the review period, I came to cherish the Hegel’s ability to juice up the realism, to pull me more deeply into the musical performance.

I think it would be news if the Hegel wasn’t better than the Bryston, given it’s 2.5 times the price. Indeed, at $7495, the 4B3 is still a stone-cold bargain; but it loses an edge to the H30A, especially through speakers as revealing as the Estelons.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had three amplifiers with similar power ratings in my system: the Bryston, the Simaudio, and this here Hegel. At 300, 225, and 300Wpc respectively, all three could be considered high-powered, but power doesn’t tell the whole story. The Simaudio and Hegel are both bruisers, weighing around 100 pounds each, and the $20,000 Simaudio clocks in very close in price to the Hegel. The Bryston is lighter; and unlike the Moon and Hegel, isn’t really billed as a drives-any-load amplifier. The Simaudio stands out due to its ambitious coachwork—all panels are made from thick, milled aluminum. But at the end of the day, none of those parameters would drive my buying decision. An amplifier has one real job: it has to sound good. All three of these amps do that, but the Hegel did it best.

In looking back over this review, I note how effusive I’ve been about the Hegel Music Systems H30A. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with all this praise because it’s part of my job to try to find something to bitch about. Well, other than the fact that I can’t afford to buy it right now, and it’s hard to move when I want to dust underneath it, the H30A hits all of my musts, wants, and needs. I can’t really find anything about this amplifier that’s even remotely unsatisfactory. This doesn’t happen very often.
- Jason Thorpe

Hegel H30A
SoundStage!Hi-FI