Rotel RHB-10

Part of the Rotel MICHI series.

Michi means "direction" and the RHB-10 was named Kokoro : heart, as written on this image.

Rotel built a lot for many and kept most of its own lineups close to the "budget high-end" throughout its life with only rare attempts at clearly tagged super-toppers like the RB-5000 and RC-5000.

Thirteen years after the 5000s, the Michi series was however launched when japanese high-end was beginning to be superceded by the unexpected return of its american and european... predecessors.

At first with only three components, the Michi series was later complemented in some markets by one variant, two sources and a less expensive sibling :

RHB-10 dual-mono power amplifier
RHC-10 passive controller
RHQ-10 phono equalizer
RHA-10 active preamplifier
RHT-10 FM tuner
RHCD-10 CD player (big)
RHB-05 power amplifier.


The RHB-10 is an enormous dual-mono powerhouse with two 1000W low-leakage toroidal power transformers (yes : 2x 1kW !) working with dual rails : low power is output in Class A, while higher needs switch the circuit to Class B.
Total power output amounts to 2x 200W (8 Ohm, 20Hz...20Khz) with little distortion.

The four big caps you can see below amount to 88,000µF and the rest of the componentry is top of the red pops : 0,01% and 0,1% tolerance Vishay resistors, 6N pure stress-free copper wiring between output stages and WBT speaker terminals, glassfiber PCBs with doubled-up copper tracks and solid copper bus bars.

Also dual-mono regulations all over separately feeding power-supply, output stages, pre-driver stages, protection relays and indicators separately through filter caps and rectifiers.

The first stage of the pre-driver stages is a fully complementary push-pull differential amplifier, followed by two emitter-follower stages.
Thermal and DC drift are dealt with through referenced center-point voltage.

The output stages make music with Darlington quadruple parallel fully complementary push-pull - symmetrical and mirrored "top, bottom, left and right" ; Sanken power devices.


Like the RC-5000 and RB-5000, the Michi series was mostly made for the export market and is just as exceedingly rare.

A japanese RHB-10 (there were some) here.