Class D is just Dandy!

phd
A well designed Class D amp will bring you in and draw you closer to your music. You also will hear deeper into your music and the details you never knew existed before suddenly appear as if previously you’ve been listening in a fog bank. My analogy/ the difference would be like looking through a dirty pane of glass as opposed to a sparkling clean one. I own two Class D amps and love them!

Odd the opposite of what was heard from the $50K Mark Levinson No.53 Class-D monoblocks

Stereophile's Michael Fremer listens to the ML No 53’s.
"Through the No.53s Cassidy’s voice was pinpoint sharp but the reverb, instead of being airy and ethereal, sounded like a hard haze that obscured detail at low levels and became fatiguing at higher ones.
As seems to be the case with switching amps, no matter how carefully designed, the higher in frequency the music goes, the more problems there are. That also holds true the more you turn up the volume. Generally speaking, the louder I played the No.53s, the more pronounced the haze. The more high-frequency content in the music—women’s voices, cymbals, reverberant backdrops—the more the haze intruded on and obscured the images, forcing me to turn down the volume."

Cheers George

@georgehifi 

Guess I didn't pay enough for them to find the problems Fremer had.

Best,

E

Georgehifi, price don't always dictate performance and you sir do not have my speakers. Mark Levinson builds conventional amps very well but maybe he should leave the design of Class D amps to manufacturers that have had a good track record of building excellent sounding Class D amps. Class D does require experimentation, careful matching with the right speakers, interconnects, power cords and preamps to get the most out of them.

Also, Fremer’s position about switching amps all having these problems is utter nonsense. Even though the review is five years old, by 2012 digital amps were getting very good. This was unsubstantiated bias which is part of the reason why Stereophile subjective opinions don’t matter at all to me anymore.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/mark-levinson-no53-reference-monoblock-power-amplifier#gJgWo1W0Vq...

The ASP range which was released in 2003 is what I listen to today and I'm perfectly happy to say Fremer was wrong then and wrong now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICEpower

Best,

E

As I read more and more about Class D amps, one thing stood out to me is the power supply. There are quite a few Class D amps out there that are being put together with DIY kits from Hypex. No doubt that these amps with DIY kits does a good 'job' on most systems and afford us the opportunity to stretch our hard earned dollars on rest of the components in the system.

But if you want the very best in Class D, consider auditioning the amps with NC-500 or NC-1200 module and SMPS1200A700 power supply. I think you will be pleasantly surprised!