Modern day Digital-to-Analog Converters are much driven by a numbers game. How high a sampling rate can they achieve? Are they bit perfect? What levels of DSD can they decode? The list is long. All of these things are essentially good features. There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing DSD files or having a bit perfect DAC.
What the Hegel engineers ended up asking themselves, however, was this; Are these features necessarily the best choice at any price point? Or is the sheer cost of making so disproportionally high that it drains the budget otherwise spent on other important components? Like the DAC-chip itself or the analog sections of the DAC. Could it be that the technology that drives the marketing is not always the best answer when it comes to sound performance?
Hegel Optimized Clock is a technology developed to address that question. It basically means we have found an optimal sampling frequency for the DAC implementation we use. The benefits of this far outweigh those of bit perfect implementation if you are on a more limited budget. The money saved can be spent on better clocks, better DAC chips, better local power supplies, or better analog components. All of which can make for a better cost/performance ratio, always one of Hegel's primary goals.
This technology is one of the reasons we have been able to offer reasonably priced DACs and integrated amplifiers with such high performance. Hegel Optimized Clock implementation can be found in products like Hegel H95, H120, H190, and others.