Hegel H-160 or Parasound Halo Integrated

steve59-

what gear, including cabling, is in your system?
I have heard the Anthem 225 on several occasions.

Happy Listening!

I've only heard the Parasound Halo a few times but each time it never left an impression on me.  The few times I heard the Hegel, I kept telling myself his one should stay on the list. The sound was full, clean and natural.  You really need to listen to both and trust your ears.  Too bad it's so hard to find brick and mortar stores that carries this stuff theses days. 

I know this always happens that someone chimes in with an alternative but I can't resist. A friend of mine just purchased a Plinius Hautonga and uses Paradigm Studio 100's. The sound is fantastic! There are two of these units for sale here on the 'gon right now. I have heard both the Plinius and Hegel amps albeit on separate systems. While comparable, I give a slight edge to the Plinius. Good luck.

I've heard both Hegel H160 and H200.  If sound is more important than having the dac, then H200 would be the way to go.  A used H200 is around $2k right now, and I think that's a great deal for a good amp like the H200. 

Just spent a few hours comparing Hegel H-160 with Parasound Halo integrated. The aim was to se how much better a new integrated would be replacing a XTZ class a100D3 divine. 
We used USB input on Halo and Hegel and Meridian Explorer2 on XTZ, Tidal HIFI (and a few tunes in Master quality) from a Macbook air as source. Speaker was Magnepan MG .7
To ensure same sound level a dB meter was used.

To make a long history short: Halo sounded like hi res music compared to Hegel and XTZ. More detailed, airier treble and midrange. Hegel was a bit harsh compairing. The XTZ sounded OK but was quite blurred, muddier. 

(But you really got to have high quality recording to be able to hear this imo. Poorly quality recordings leaves the whole ($$$) set up above meaningless!