I am looking to upgrade and distribute our system across several locations in the home. In the main listening rom I am looking seriously at Hegel because (1) it is very good equipment (2) I am also Norwegian, and because of (2) I greatly prefer minimalist designs. Hegel, like many others is recognizing that for many people, there will be a single source of input and it will be digital, not line-level. So they are integrating DACs into their amplifier designs, which is highly appealing (see (2) above). I asked about DSD support and here is what they responded:
"Our DAC's do not support DSD. The reason behind that is quite simply
that there are no chips available that we feel does DSD while keeping the
quality on regular PCM (which most of your music probably is). That may also
be the reason to why some DSD demo's seems very convincing. So by
implementing DSD we would reduce the sound quality on PCM. We hope that some
day, a chip that does both well becomes available. "
Something to consider. There is tremendous movement in the field right now, makes it fun and hard to decide as well. Two constants: a good amplifier and a good set of speakers.
