Hegel gets into the groove
Hegel have announced their latest product, the V10 phonostage.
Designed in house from the ground up rather than using off the shelf components, the V10 is pure Hegel and utilises some clever and bespoke technologies. Just as with the award-winning Hegel amplifiers, everything is designed and engineered to make the music sound as good as possible.
The chassis is divided into two compartments, physically separating the power supplies from the sensitive amplification circuitry, and there is simply no detectable interference between the two parts. For the best possible connection, the V10 is fitted with gold-plated terminals, balanced XLR outputs, and a solid custom grounding screw. On the all-important input stage, Hegel have used ultra-low-noise discrete JFET transistors for both the Moving Magnet (MM) and Moving Coil (MC) input. Eliminating external noise is especially important when using sensitive low output MC cartridges, that is why they have fitted the MC input with four such transistors connected in parallel making the input completely silent and stopping any bias current feedback to the cartridge coil.
The input signal feeds into equally silent amplifier circuits, where both the MM and the MC gain stages use ultra-low-noise power supplies built with discrete bipolar transistors to keep the signal noise at a minimum, this ensures an extremely accurate amplification of the input signal coming from the turntable. To make sure the V10 gets the best operating conditions, it is supplied with a linear, low noise, analog AC-power supply. This power supply features a large, custom design, E-core transformer, placed in its own housing to eliminate all possibility of interference.
The V10 is not designed only for vinyl elites but for everybody to enjoy, so out of the box it is configured as an excellent plug and play MM preamplifier. For many, this is exactly what they want and need, but some want even more so the V10 highly optimisable, catering to individual preferences and requirements in set up.
The V10 is adjustable for any MM and MC cartridge. When using a MM cartridge, you can freely increase the Capacitance between 100 and 467 pF and when using a MC cartridge, the impedance can be set freely between 33 and 550 ohms or fixed at 47 kohm. On both MM and MC, the gain can be increased by 5, 10 or 12 dB, matching the output of your other sources, the V10 even has a Subsonic Filter to remove unwanted low frequency noise. And at the end of the night, when the listening session takes you way past bedtime and you forget to turn off the V10, the adjustable auto standby function does that for you.
Look out for the reviews to appear soon, I’ll post links below as I get them. The reviews will make interesting reading as the V10 is a tremendous product. Shipping will begin mid-February but dealers are taking orders now.
Read more on the Hegel Website.
