Well, my budget at the time was about 3k but i did go higher and bought the Hegel 190V and have been extremely happy with it. I did not get a chance to listen to it before i bought it. I went out in the wild. By me there were none handy so to speak so I checked out a few others but kept coming back to this one.
I would describe it as neutral. I think it allows me to put just about anything with it. Right now have what i consider a modest system compared to many i see here and other boards. Monitor Silver 300’s with matching sub / Technics SL-100 with an ATVMN60SLC (just recently picked up a HannaSL so will be fun to see how that changes things ) and this runs through an Iphon3 Black pre amp / Rotel Tribute CD player / Audeze MM500 headphones and a pair of Senheiser 600/ also run a Schiit Lokius, one each between the table and CD player.
So, the Hegal seems to handle these units with ease. Allows the units to do what they do. The only thing i did not really like was the phono preamp that is built in. Nice pre-amp, especially for built in but here it was a bit overly analytical, at least with the MM cartridges i have, but really not a problem and it only runs MM cartridges.
I have the Rotel running through an anolog input. The DAC seems to be very nice. I am no expert, but a very definitive improvement over the Marantz i previously had.
Also, the builtin headphone amp is more than adequate. No issues using either pair of headphones. Certainly do not feel the need to upgrade it and also partly why i went this way.
There are things i have not used as i am a simple user, vinyl and cd’s mainly. Have the computer hard wired to the unit as well for Qobuz and that works nicely. Maybe get a streamer one day but think i will upgrade the Rotel first.
All i got....Honestly do not think you can go wrong with the 190V
