The Hegel V10 is the Norwegian brand’s first phono stage. With 30 years’ experience designing discrete transistor circuits, Hegel claims to “have built a phono preamplifier like no other. It is neutral, dynamic, and exceptionally revealing. We have used all our knowledge in amplification and applied it to one goal – To reach down into the record and reveal every bit of information.
“The chassis is divided into two compartments, physically separating the power supplies from the sensitive amplification circuitry. There is simply no detectable interference between the two parts. For the best possible connection, we have fitted the V10 with gold-plated terminals, balanced XLR outputs, and a solid custom grounding screw. On the all-important input stage, we 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 we 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. And to make sure the V10 gets the best operating conditions, it is supplied with a linear, low noise, analogue AC-power supply. This features a large, custom design, E-core transformer, placed in its own housing to eliminate all possibility of interference.
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 the adjustable auto standby function does that for you.” The V10 retails for £1,350.