Which Hegel Amp with LRS+

depends on size of room and how loud you want to play the lrs’s

h190 under most normal use cases will be quite sufficient, but h390 obviously provides a greater (but perhaps unnecessary) degree of headroom on transients

in my own case, i found the h190 worked just fine with my 1.7i’s in a 19x23x10 room, speakers 3.5 ft up from front wall, 10 ft equilateral listening triangle, 85-88 db peaks, no strain, no foreshortening of the soundstage when pushed (a typical sign of lack of headroom)

lets not lose perspective... the guys at audio excellence canada in their lrs demo room used a last gen entry level hegel h90, which drove them satisfyingly to loud levels, did not shut down or distort... these guys (adrian and vilip) listen *loud*...

https://youtu.be/6evL9n0gcNs

h190 drive bigger maggies very well... nothing wrong with anyone wanting an h390... but need vs want are different things

@stuartk

i have had all three (190, 390, 590), along with an h20 power amp, but that is an aside

to me, used as an amplifier only (no dac) through the rca or xlr inputs the 190 and 590 have a similar amount of high treble energy, the 390 is ever slightly smoothed over up top and in the upper mids -- overall i would say the 390 sounds the ’warmest’ even though they all obviously provide a close family resemblance in sonic presentation - the differences here are less than, for instance, plugging in a pass int-60, which provides even more midrange warmth and tube like 'wooliness'

depending on the speaker being driven the 190 may have a touch less low end grip and can sound a little leaner, but this is very speaker dependent and this would be heard on quite a difficult, reactive low impedance speaker (which the maggie is not)

i kept the 390 as it has the better internal dac than the 190, decodes mqa, and with my maggies i don’t need that touch of treble energy the 590 provides... and the 2 grand price difference is well applied elsewhere