Sad Gold Note only gave marketing BS as a description. I would love to see an IEEE or AES paper on whatever they are doing to see if it really is innovative. The bummer is it is within my price, but only direct sales and no audition/return policy I could find. Their published specs are not defined so even though they are not impressive, not knowing the parameters makes them meaningless. At what power/frequency is .01% distortion? Is it .0001% half a Watt lower? Could be a great amp, could be not so. Totally useless specs.
"Well executed" does seem to be the issue. I guess my best bet is a Buckeye/Purify based amp. Either that or go the safe rout with a Schiit Vidar. I have recently heard a Hypex based amp and it is far better than the older ICE amps or the new CH-FI $80 wonders, but not there yet.
The mentioned Peachtree "digital input amplifier " I started the thread on, maybe some clarification. Their point is they did not have a DAC on the front end. Their block diagram, not mine.
If the specific implementation of using a triangle and an analog signal to generate the PWM control only being class D, then that implementation needs a DAC somewhere along the line before the conversion. Two DACs if you count the output filter. That is not what they were saying as they do the entire processing from PCM to the PWM control in the digital domain. I would still call it a class D, just a different way to get there. That is what their literature says.