Audio Excellence carries many of Hegel’s systems. It has been a top-seller within our store, not only do we support the brand but the products speak for itself. Hegel’s success can be shown through their constant development of new systems and improvements on current ones as-well. Here is a review written by Michael Fremer highlighting the recent V10 Phono Amplifier by Hegel.
When in the late 1980s Bent Holter started Hegel—named after The Hegel Band, a rock band in which he played, which itself must have been named for the philosopher—designing a phono preamplifier would have been the last thing on his mind, if a phono preamplifier would have been at all on his mind—at least one to manufacture. He’d built one for personal use, I recall him telling me a few years ago at an EISA convention.
The late ‘80s was the dawning of the commercial digital audio age and vinyl was going the way of the typewriter, the slide projector and the cassette.
More recently, with the vinyl resurgence in full swing, Hegel set its sights on designing a phono preamplifier. The resulting V10, “developed from the ground up” it says in the instruction manual was designed to “keep the music signal as close to the original recording as possible. Therefore, we are constantly looking for ways to lower distortion and noise.”
The $1500 V10 is a relatively small unit, thanks in part to a generously sized outboard dual mono 2 X 18VAC/300mA power1 source featuring a custom-designed E-core transformer that plugs directly into an A.C. socket and connects to the main unit via a long “Y” cable that splits out to dual plugs inserted into a pair of jacks located in an underside chassis recess angled 90 degrees from the front and rear main chassis panels.
