Competitive class D amp suggestions

@veerossi The designer of the Atma-Sphere GaN amp @atmasphere is on here regularly and hopefully he’ll chime in here with some very helpful suggestions and insights.  I believe he now uses his new GaN amp in his own system even over his very highly-regarded OTL tube amps so that may give you a clue, but hopefully Ralph can add more meat on the bones here for you. 

If you will decide to try Atma-Sphere class D amp, you may start to control it with the volume control of your DAC of course. Then you will see if you like the result and then think of a preamp (I have been using a passive preamp with class D). I think the amp is worth of trying and it comes with 15 days of trial (I ordered it just recently). 

For the Atma-sphere class D amp: Is a preamplifier necessary if only connecting a streamer/DAC to it? The streamer/DAC has it’s own volume control (if I want to enable it). Lumin S1.

@veerossi 

Most digital products can drive it directly with ease.

Other than heat and efficiency, what do you think are the pros/cons of moving to this amplifier from an 805 tube amp (Line Magnetic LM-805ia)?

Its my opinion that the specs listed on the Line Magnetic website are suspect. At such high power levels its very hard to make an output transformer that will support that kind of bandwidth and be SET at the same time. At any rate, you'll likely appreciate the extra power, and if you are using a high efficiency speaker you'll appreciate the lower noise floor of the class D as well. My speakers are 98dB and I have to have my head in the midrange horn to hear any noise from the amps at all. That translates easily to better low level detail, assuming that the amp has all its other ducks in a row.

Its not going to be as lush but its not dry. It won't be as lush because its distortion is so much lower. The advantage is there is more musical detail and it does this without brightness. Distortion obscures detail, and its a simple fact that whether they admit it or not, before the onset of clipping nearly every SET made makes about 10% distortion. What this means is that any any power level an SET can make, the class D is going to be well over 2 orders of magnitude lower distortion- and so at any power level will offer more musical information.

Its not dry because the distortion it makes is very much like that of a tube amplifier- with the 2nd and 3rd harmonics being far more prominent than the higher orders, but of course all at a much lower level than you can get from a tube amp. That is why I ended the last paragraph the way I did- this stuff is easy to hear.

Thank you soix, niodari, and atmasphere for responding. After talking to Ralph the other day, I bought a set of them. They should be here next week along with some Mogami Gold Studio XLR cables. I can’t wait!

Good news! It looks like that we both will be reporting our impressions on the amplifier almost simultaneously.