High End Amp Price Collapse musings

Hi, I think that however good Class D becomes, it will always sound different than Class A, and a significant enough number of audiophiles will consider them worth their weight that the market for used class A / AB amps will not take a nose dive anytime soon.

As for the discussion regarding vinyl, I ditched mine a long ago in favor of CDs. I don’t miss the vinyl, though I can relate to the elegance of an all analog path. After all, all speakers are analog, as they must be, since our ears are.

As I said I ditched my records a long time ago. I still have my 1,000 or so CDs, but I don’t listen to them anymore. Instead I listen to FLAC files (I subscribe to TIDAL) for the following reasons:

1). Economic: I get access to all of my CD’s (or near enough as makes no matter) plus anything else I want to try on for size. The $20/month I pay to tidal is nothing. There was a time I spent 20 times that amount or more on CDs.

Plus I don’t need to spend a lot of money on playback devices. Vinyl enthusiasts spend thousands on turntables and cartridges. I see record cleaners costing more than $1,000!!!

2) Convenience Tidal stores my music for me (though I do store my favorite albums on my phone so I can listen to them when I don’t have a high speed internet connection)

3) Longevity: My FLAC files will never wear out, get scratched, or otherwise degrade. You can’t even say that for CD’s though they are less susceptible to wear and somewhat more forgiving of minor damage than vinyl.

4) Portability. I can take all my music with me wherever I go. If I don’t have an acceptable setup available for playing through loudspeakers, I can connect my Oppo headphones to my phone (an LG V20 which sports a decent DAC).

Having said all that, I am in the market for a new amp and am leaning toward class AB tubes because I think my Magnepan 1.7s will respond well to that configuration. Though I am intrigued by the Rogue hybrid (tube pre-amp section; Class D amplifier section), I am going to be looking for a used all tube solution (maybe Audio Research).

One more aside: According to my understanding, calling class D amps digital is a bit of a misnomer. They are no more digital than your microwave (which has some ’digitalness’ to it since it has only two modes: on and off). Like a microwave a Class D is either on or off as opposed to a Class A/B which is always on. The difference between a class D amp and a microwave is that a class D amp switches on and off so fast that it "looks" to your speaker like a varying continuous signal.

I have enjoyed this thread, and hope my post is not too long-winded. Thanks all.

Like computers Class D amps are still evolving. A guys walks into a computer store for a possible purchase. He finally tells the clerk that he has decided to wait till computers improve in the near future. The clerk responds, then you will never own one because they are constantly improving.

Class-D is nothing new.  It's been around since the 50's if not longer... about the same time the transistor came about.

Why has it taken so long for it to become the "next great thing"??

I've owned a couple of high end Class-D amps, NuForce References as well as Bel Canto and they weren't bad.  They were quite good, but there was always something missing.  Will they get better, of course, but so will transistor designs and tube designs.

I guess I just like big, heavy amps.  :)

I think the dollar will collapse before hi end amplifiers do. 
Not sure that would solve your issues

Like a microwave a Class D is either on or off as opposed to a Class A/B which is always on.

Not really... a Class A/B output device is either partially-ON or completely off. (Class A outputs are always partially-ON). The "partially-ON" part is the hard one, no device is entirely linear doing that. So they basically do just "some more" or "some less" in relatively accurate but still uneven amounts.

But the very fast solid state devices are VERY good at being ON or OFF over precise times, so in at least that way that works better -- the power devices don’t have to be linear, they just have to be fast.