Hegel V10 Phono Preamplifier

Meet the V10 Phono Preamplifier

Truly amazing sound, to get you into the groove. 

The Hegel V10 is a brand-new take on an old technology. With 30 years' experience designing state-of-the-art discrete transistor circuits, Hegel Music Systems have built a phono preamplifier like no other. It is neutral, dynamic, and exceptionally revealing. Hegel has applied their knowledge in amplification to one goal - to reach down into the record and reveal every bit of information.

The V10 is designed to capture the sound. To get you closer to the music. To get you into the groove.

Listening to vinyl is a tactile experience. You carefully open the album jacket, remove the record from the inner sleeve, inspect for dust or scratches, place it on the platter, and slowly let the needle drop to let the sound out. It is all about you and your music, selected for exactly this moment. The V10 aims to make this special experience even better. Developed from the ground up and utilising clever, unique technologies, the V10 will give you an unprecedented transparency and soundscape making the music you hear as tangible and real as the record it is pressed into.

The V10 is designed with the sole purpose of making your music sound as good as possible. 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, 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, so the MC input is fitted 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 features a large, custom design, E-core transformer, placed in its own housing to eliminate all possibility of interference.

Out of the box the V10 is configured as an excellent plug and play MM preamplifier, it is highly optimisable, catering to individual preferences and requirements in set up, the V10 can be adjusted 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. 

About Hegel Music Systems