High end Class D amps?

Would love to hear the AGD amps, any news on his active speaker collaboration? Cheers

Having owned the lot from Merrill to Nord to Rowland to every conceivable output board in multiple iterations, including Bruno's latest which to me sounded very similar to Ncore, tube input stages, transformer coupled input stages, etc etc..the best I achieved was with a Rogue Medusa with a ton of money thrown at it in part upgrades and it still could not quite match the best A/B amps and certainly not the best class A amps.  I concluded class D was very very good with attractive attributes when well implemented and for me best used as my summer amp or in an AV setup. I am still a fan but thought it to be limited.

Then out of curiosity this spring I grabbed an ARC DS225 from a few years back to use as a back-up in an office system backing up Valvet A4e monos at the time in the summer months. To my surprise, DS225 is easily the best class D amp I have owned and I would say on par with a top shelf A/B design of similar power. Not particularly sure why it should be other than perhaps a completely in house design by a company known for its tube products, ARC apparently spent 2 years designing its own output stage, a huge linear PS (which has also been a component of other class D designs I have owned and certainly all of the better ones). Where it differs from all others is having no global NFB and hence a more modest damping factor of 167. Sonically, its the first class D amp I have encountered that really suffers no dead zone, and is fully "on song" at the lowest of volumes. I would say its easily the most enjoyable amp I have ever owned listening to at low volumes, which I do a lot of at night. Bass which unlike most people I find typically to NOT be a strength of most class D because it is almost always over damped for the modern speaker, is stellar on the DS225, fast and articulate but with some body like bass actually sounds. The biggest difference though and where all others I have owned really fall short including the Rogue, it actually digs deep in the midrange to flesh out with some tone and grunge to acoustic and electric guitar for example, like good class A and even dare I say a good valve amp is know to do. My sense is the DS225 probably does not measure as "pristine" spec wise as say an off the shelf Ncore module, but that says more about the Ncore than anything. Grab one if you see one, somehow they fell through the audio crack into oblivion and no one really noticed. It happens. 

Bass which unlike most people I find typically to NOT be a strength of most class D because it is almost always over damped for the modern speaker, is stellar on the DS225, fast and articulate but with some body like bass actually sounds.

@petland any damping factor over about 20 or so is going to be too much for almost any speaker made. You won't be able to hear a difference between 100 or 1000 if that were the only variable....

Hello, somehow I am on similar situation.
what I can say after listening many class d is to don’t rely too much on latest chip and this works as well for Dac but is the implementation that make big difference. There are three or 4 main chip manufacturers on class D, but only two (Purify is basically a rebrand of Hypex) are giving the bases for the implementation. What I see is that the are some purist who calculate best class d in Sinad but this is math and doesn’t tell you how it sound. The sonic difference are given by op amp (extra board) and other tricks that add somehow signal distortion (sorry for defining as such) and this make a sonic difference. What sound better is up to you and your match. You can take the oem amply and rely only on chip then add the coloration you want by pre amp or you can play with big brand who customise the chip or oem assembler who give you possibility to add extra operational amps to change sonic features. Somehow technology is mature but I believe there will be other chip in the future who
will add maybe other tricks, maybe a built in Dac for instance?! Is big market out there and cheaper than producing SS or tube, many brands jump into it others not probably they don’t have the capability. try and listen then take your consideration