Siblings in Hegel's H range, so they share a design and a house sound. It comes down to power, features and price.
| Area | Better | Why |
|---|
| Power | B | Hegel H600 has more power - 303W against 200W into 8 ohms. That is about 1.8dB, which is a small step in loudness but real headroom on peaks. |
| Bass control | B | Hegel H600 has the higher damping factor (4000 vs 1000), which usually means a tighter grip on a woofer. Above about 100 the returns flatten out, so read this as a tendency rather than a ranking. |
| Noise floor | evenly matched | Much the same signal-to-noise ratio (100dB vs 100dB). |
| Built-in DAC | B | Hegel H600 has a DAC on board; the other needs an external one, which is another box, another power lead and another purchase. |
| Analogue inputs | B | Hegel H600 takes more analogue sources - 4 against 2. |
| Shelf space | depends | Hegel H20 takes up about 17% less shelf area (1591cm² against 1914cm²), and it is 75mm shallower, which is the measurement that decides whether a rack door shuts. |
| Price | A | Hegel H20 costs less - $7,200 against $13,800 at list. |
| Watts per dollar | A | Hegel H20 is the cheaper watt - about $36 per watt against $46. A blunt measure, and it says nothing about how either sounds, but it is the honest one for raw output. |
A Hegel H20 B Hegel H600
depends neither is better in the abstract - it turns on your room, your system or how you will use them. Only specs published for both amplifiers are judged; anything missing on either side is left out rather than guessed.
Which should you choose?
The usual trade-off: Hegel H600 measures better, Hegel H20 costs about 48% less. With most speakers in most rooms that gap is smaller in practice than it looks here. If you already own a DAC or a streamer, the built-in one is money you are paying twice for, and Hegel H20 becomes the more rational buy. Think about the whole system: the roughly $6,600 saved by taking the cheaper one would buy better speakers or a subwoofer, which does more for the sound than the difference between two competent amplifiers.
What a spec sheet cannot show: how either sounds with your speakers, how the controls feel day to day, and what the app is like to live with - which is where most all-in-one amplifiers are actually won or lost. Power figures are the manufacturers' own and are not measured to a common standard, so treat small differences as noise. If you can hear both, that will tell you more than any row above.