The play/pause button worked fine with all the music apps on my MacBook Pro. You can pause and resume playback, and skip to the next or previous track. It has buttons for adjusting and muting volume, cycling through sources, and controlling playback from a computer attached to the H120’s USB port. Like the H120 itself, the supplied remote control feels satisfyingly solid. This component should inspire in its buyer pride of ownership. The controls have a solid, silky feel, with detents that provide just the right degree of resistance during operation. To the left of the display is a large knob for source selection, and to the right, another for controlling volume. At lower right is a 6.3mm headphone jack. In the center of the front panel is a 5”W x 1.5”H monochrome OLED screen that displays the source name, volume level, and other information, such as sampling rate during digital playback. Hegel provided me with a sample finished in a lovely warm white: matte on the vented top and sides, and gloss on the front panel, which curves gracefully outward.
Hegel is based in Oslo, Norway, and true to its Scandinavian origins, the H120 is a thing of minimalist beauty.
Like its predecessor, the H120 combines in one elegant case an amplifier specified to output 75Wpc into 8 ohms and a high-resolution DAC. In a follow-up six months later, he praised the Röst’s “consistently clean and dynamic quality” and “well-controlled bass and crisp rendering of transients,” and concluded that “the Röst rules.” And so, six months after its publication, a Reviewers’ Choice badge was added to Al’s original review.Īnnounced earlier this fall, Hegel’s H120 ($3000, all prices USD) succeeds the Röst. That product was the Hegel Music Systems Röst integrated amplifier-DAC, reviewed for Simplifi by Al Griffin in February 2017 - in fact, the Röst was the first integrated amplifier to be reviewed on this site.Īfter his review was published, Al continued living with the Röst, using it with a variety of speakers, and comparing its DAC section to competing products. To my knowledge, in the 24 years of the SoundStage! Network only one product has ever been retroactively granted a Reviewers’ Choice award.