Just spent a few hours comparing Hegel H-160 with Parasound Halo integrated. The aim was to se how much better a new integrated would be replacing a XTZ class a100D3 divine.
We used USB input on Halo and Hegel and Meridian Explorer2 on XTZ, Tidal HIFI (and a few tunes in Master quality) from a Macbook air as source. Speaker was Magnepan MG .7
To ensure same sound level a dB meter was used.
To make a long history short: Halo sounded like hi res music compared to Hegel and XTZ. More detailed, airier treble and midrange. Hegel was a bit harsh compairing. The XTZ sounded OK but was quite blurred, muddier.
(But you really got to have high quality recording to be able to hear this imo. Poorly quality recordings leaves the whole ($$$) set up above meaningless!
We used USB input on Halo and Hegel and Meridian Explorer2 on XTZ, Tidal HIFI (and a few tunes in Master quality) from a Macbook air as source. Speaker was Magnepan MG .7
To ensure same sound level a dB meter was used.
To make a long history short: Halo sounded like hi res music compared to Hegel and XTZ. More detailed, airier treble and midrange. Hegel was a bit harsh compairing. The XTZ sounded OK but was quite blurred, muddier.
(But you really got to have high quality recording to be able to hear this imo. Poorly quality recordings leaves the whole ($$$) set up above meaningless!