Class D is just Dandy!

@erik_squires 

Thanks for starting this. I had just ordered a NuPrime IDA-16 class-D amp when this popped up.

It is a great amp. Many have already described how good class-D can be so I won't go into that. I'll just say I concur.

Anyone looking for an amp owe it to themselves to at least check out some class-D offerings.

It's new and I'm only a week in with about 70 hours on it but my NuPrime is the most satisfying amp I've listened to since giving up my octal tube pre/845 SET amp. No, it doesn't sound like tubes but it so musical and easy to listen to.

Here's to class-D!

Cheers,

Scott

My Primare I32 arrived yesterday. I am a convert and it's not even fully burned in yet. Female vocals are simply indescribable!

I'm using a little HiFiBerry AMP+ that's mounted on top of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in our family room to drive some old JBL 4311B studio monitors. The RPi is running Roon Bridge, so it serves as a Roon output. This combination sounds surprisingly good. I have not tried this little gizmo in the big rig, but it's clear that there's fun to be had at all price points in Class D these days.

https://www.dsnyder.ws-e.com/photos/potn/HiFiBerry_AMP+.jpg

Hi Everyone, I owned a Rogue Pharaoh for over a year. I can attest to how good it sounds...it was a vast improvement in every way over the Cronus Magnum it replaced. It drove my Magnepan 1.7s very nicely. What I really enjoyed was how responsive it was when tube rolling the two 12au7s in the preamp section. You could really taylor the sound to you music & speakers. 

I think we'll all live long enough to see the day when Class D is the only amp used in subwoofs. The little 350-watt plate amps in my Tylers allow for a higher-frequency roll-off that spares the tubes some real heavy-lifting and allows them to concentrate on critical mid-bass, mids and highs where (don't want to start a flame-throwing contest here) tubes still reign supreme.  I also have one of those little cigarette-pack-sized 20 WPC Class D Lepais (which always seem to be on close-out for $20 from Parts Express ) that is on 24/7 hooked up to a pair of small $60 Dayton speaks for the TV: net result being an $80 "sound bar" that sounds pretty good and beats anything from Wal-Mart for $<200. (I mean, who wants to waste tubes listening to Judy Woodruff or some ancient B&W movie with a crappy sound-track anyway?)

Subject for another thread, perhaps, but why do the makers of of $2,000 flat-screen TVs include sound that is worst than a 1950s transistor radio?
Class D amps seem to be very much more speaker impedance sensitive than traditional A/B types. Knowing that an 8-ohm (nominal) speaker can wander down to 2 ohms depending on the music, I wonder about the effect on Class Ds at high levels with fussy electrostats, for example.

So much in future will depend on execution just as it does now: pwr supplies, the outputs' electrical behaviours, good ol' quality control, the quirkiness of the specific technology and the like. I can just see a snobbery develop amongst transistor types towards Class D amps the way some of my tube-loving brethren hold against s/s/ amps. The ultimate arbiter will be the ear, and we each have a different pair ...