The new Parasound Halo HINT 6 integrated amplifier is in Curl’s tradition. The HINT 6 sounded like best ever. It even sounds too good with inefficient speakers as well. With that much power on tap, the speakers sounded better and better played nice and loud.
Parasound is known for its high-end headphones, especially the top models designed by John Curl. It has a Burr Brown analog resistor ladder volume control. The amplifier has dimmable front panel volume display and with updated USB receiver is plug and play with Windows 10 and MAC.
The Specs
This amplifier thrust with 160 watts per channel for 8-ohm speakers, 240 watts per channel for 4-ohm speakers, and it’s based on John Curl’s designs used in Parasound’s separate power amplifiers. Up front, it has a solid aluminum volume knob sits next to an easy-to-read display that shows volume. Different from the most high-end amps, the HINT 6 has bass and treble tone controls.
Digital connectivity runs the range; inputs include two optical, one coaxial, and the USB 2.0 input supports up to high-res 384 kHz/32-bit PCM digital, native DSD256 and DoP DSD digital streams. The coax and optical inputs only accept PCM up to 192 kHz/24-bit.
Well the new and modified amplifier has six sets of stereo RCA analog inputs. It includes one moving-magnet/moving-coil phono input for turntable; a stereo set of XLR inputs; stereo RCA Rec Out jacks. Besides that it has one XLR and two RCA subwoofer output jacks; stereo XLR and RCA preamp outputs; and heavy-duty speaker binding posts. While the front-panel 3.5mm analog input jack for easy hookup to an external device like a MP3 player. The HINT 6’s 3.5mm headphone jack seems out of place on a home component, because most of my full-size headphones have 6.3mm plugs. It results in that the HINT 6’s sound quality with headphones is the best.
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