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Ayre AX7e vs Hegel H160

Buying a small system for my daughter and son-in-law's house warming gift.  The both use Pono's which can be used in balanced mode with amps that have a balanced input.  The best integrateds I can find with a balanced input  in my price range are the above mentioned ones.  No tube amp recommendations-- too fussy for these folks.

Speakers are Dynaudio Focus 160's.  Room is 12 x 15 and they listen mostly to acoustic Americana music at moderate volumes. Both are well reviewed -- the Ayre particularly so.

Is the Ayre at 60 watts/8 ohms and 120 / 4 ohms  enough to drive the relative inefficient speakers? The Hegel at 150 watts is clearly more powerful but I am worried about the DAC becoming out of date. The Ayre is slightly cheaper but with a couple hundred of the Hegel. 

Help me decide please.  I need to pull the trigger tomorrow.
teeshot

Showing 2 responses by yyzsantabarbara

yyzsantabarbara
4,530 posts
 
I do not know too much about Ayre. I do know Hegel and they make gear that pulls above their weight. The DACs are also well regarded.
yyzsantabarbara
4,530 posts
 
"But given that streaming from iPhones and other mobile devices seems to be more of the current thing,"
If you are going to stream music from an iPhone then I highly recommend the Peachtree Nova 150. Should be similar or cheaper price to the 2 units the OP has listed.

In the past I would never have listened to iTunes on my stereo system. The only reason I had iTunes in the first place was someone gave me a gift card for iTunes so I tried it out.

Recently my Sonare SonicOrbiter went on the frits and I could not get music from my server to my Peachtree which is located in another room. So I decided to try the iTunes library that was on my iPhone. I was surprised at how good the MP3 sounded through the Peachtree. It turns out that the dedicated Peachtree USB input for Apple has some magic to make iTunes sound better than expected. Not great but rather good for MP3.

I have FM radio, iTunes, and once my Ethernet-to-USB device is fixed, FLAC via my music server playing through the excellent Peachtree 150.
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