HEGEL H600 > Soundstage! Review
An analogous truism is that you can’t know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it. A case in point: soon after I began my audition of Hegel Music Systems’ H600, their new flagship integrated amplifier-DAC ($12,500, all prices in USD), I came to realize what the missing element in my system had been. It was an epiphany.
Conclusion
The Hegel H600 is an exceptional integrated amplifier. Using the Bryston BDA-2 DAC I was able to compare the H600 and B135 strictly as integrated amplifiers and found the former superior—effortless and pristine at any volume. Remarkably, Hegel includes with this outstanding amplifier a topflight DAC that can easily rival external DACs costing thousands of dollars. This is the finest integrated amplifier-DAC combination I’ve heard in my time as a reviewer. At $12,500, the H600 isn’t cheap, but I suspect it would cost at least as much, probably more, to find another combination of integrated amplifier and DAC, whether as one or two units, that could outperform it.