Hegel's new A200 is a plain black box with two knobs and a small display, and it's almost certainly the next thing I buy. It only comes in black for now, which I'd have picked anyway. What sold me is what Hegel left out. The A200 shares its 150-watt amplifier with the new H200, but where the H200 adds streaming and a DAC, the A200 has no converter, no network card and no digital inputs at all.

My rack doesn't need any of that. The Cambridge Audio CXN100 already handles everything upstream: streaming, the 2,000-odd ripped CDs, and its own ESS ES9028Q2M converter. The H200 would mean paying for a second streamer and a second DAC, then leaving one of each switched off. I went back and forth on external DACs at the start of the year, and the conclusion still holds for me: pick the converter you like and don't bury another one inside the amplifier.

The CXN100 has balanced XLR outputs and the A200 has two pairs of balanced XLR inputs, so the whole connection is one short balanced run. The phono stage borrowed from Hegel's V10, the variable output for a subwoofer and the headphone socket are, for now, hardware I'd pay for and ignore, which is the H200's sin on a smaller scale. At least none of it will ever ask me to install a firmware update.

ATC rates the SCM11 at 85dB sensitivity and recommends 75 to 300 watts. The Exposure 2510 I wrote about in February makes 75, the very bottom of that range. It never actually ran out of headroom, and I rarely took the volume past halfway, yet the combination always sounded as if it were leaning into the load rather than sitting back from it. That's an impression, not a measurement, and it's carrying most of the case for more power. The A200 doubles the rated power into 8 ohms, which is only about 3dB, margin rather than transformation. Hegel's quoted damping factor above 4,000 I'd take with some suspicion, since the cable and the SCM11's own crossover dilute it long before it reaches the drive unit.

The A200 is due in late October at £2,750. ATC describes the SCM11's impedance curve as flat and easy on amplifiers, so the pairing shouldn't be a fight. My doubt runs the other way. Back in February I wrote that the SCM11 has a forensic streak that could sound lean or clinical with the wrong amplifier, and the Exposure's warmth always covered for that. A grippier amplifier might strip the cover away. So I want to hear the CXN100 feeding the A200 over XLR into my own speakers, playing my own records, before any money moves.

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