Oh how I wish Class D amps ...

I replaced a 120 w/ch Musical Fidelity A3CR with the 500w/ch BelCanto ref1000m monoblocks.

This was primarily for the benefit of my big OHM F5 series 3 speakers, the largest and most power hungry I own also in teh largest room.

In my case, the difference in performance I can hear is clearly in line with the difference in specs, so my findings in my case differ from Ckoffend's case.

The BC ref1000m monoblocks also seemed to benefit my smaller OHM 100S3s and my Dynaudio Contour 1.3mkII monitors as well, although to a lesser degree with the smaller speakers.

I also run a pair of little Realistic Minimus 7's off the Bel Canto amps on my deck. The sound here is top notch for those little speakers as well compared to prior amps, but the practical difference with such small speakers in that application is practically nill.

I also used to own a 1970's vintage Class G Hitachi sr803 receiver for many years. Class G is an older similar but much different relative of Class D.

The Class G amp there clearly exhibited its advertised ability to deliver double its rated 50w/ch for only brief periods. THough it had some guts for a smaller 50w receiver, it did not perform as well as its true 100w/ch brethren of the time. That sound was quite meh, nothing even close to the modern bar set by the better modern amps.

Correction:

The Class G Hitachi receiver I owned was a sr-804, not an sr-803.

" Any of the class D users driving a pair of soundlab speakers;if so whats your opinion?"

A friend of mine with soundlab (latest A1) have auditioned my Wilson's Sasha driven by the pair of Spectron monoblocks and also bought the pair. (He used to have Pass Lab X350.5) I love the sound of his system and so does he.
Pass Lab, rather suprisingly for me, sounded "grayish" or "grainy" with shallow bass and very little dynamics in comparison to Spectron. I suspect this is only because these electrostatics demand power and power and power and Spectrons have about 7kW peak power.

Mike

Soundlabs don't actually need all that much power, but transistor amps (including class D) have trouble making power into the impedances of the Soundlab. Its for this reason that people using transistors tend to use very high power amps with them.

For example if you have an amp with 600 watt/8 ohms, on the Soundlab the amp will make about 150 watts. IMO/IME the bar that has to be met by class D is not how they compare to traditional transistor designs but (especially on SoundLabs) how well they compare to tube amplification.