ICE Amps for classical music?

Mapman, I can't say how happy I am to hear your testament. Class D has got such an undeserved bad rap over the last 7 years.

It has been my experience that a great class D amp requires great everything else. By great, I don't mean expensive necessarily. The Fire preamp was made to work with the demands of a class D amp, but it also is superb with any other fine amp. Almost all tube amps match well to class D.

I still use Speltz's Anti - Cables for the ICs. I have found very thin ribbon SCs to be, by far, the best SCs.

"a great class D amp requires great everything else"

I have no data points to weigh in on this in that the class D amp was the last upgrade I did once I felt everything else was in order.

My gut feel is that the Bel Canto Ref1000mkii will not be the bottleneck in most any system that a high power, high current, high damping factor SS amp is suited for, so at that point other weaknesses might be exposed if present.

Ironically in addition to classical music, modern "loudness wars" more pop oriented CDs are the other type that have benefited most from the Bel canto ref1000mkii introduction into my system. These CDs will expose the limits of an underpowered or poorly matched amp/speaker pair IMHO. With the proper muscle behind it, one can enjoy the things that these recordings do have to offer without having to lament about shortcomings which may be at least partially due to the playback system not having enough "muscle" and authority to deliver what these kinds of CDs are capable of sounding like, for better or for worse.

Mapman,

What are you using for speakers and pre into the Bel canto's.
This weekend i will be doing a comparison between my S500 series 2 threshold and a pr of Bel canto mono's on 1.6 maggies
the results will be interesting for me as I'm still on the fence with class-d .

Muralman,

Mine are a 3 way hybrid. ribbons in the mid.high only dynamic bass driver for the bass. 4 ohm on the bass and 1.5 ohm on the ribbons from 250hz to 22K.

I will take you up on the NC offer, i have a very good friend that lives in Huntersville , big hi-fi nut 2 and is into class-d himself ( rotel ) with Logans , I'm sure he would love to hear the H2O as he is not happy with the rotels ( 2 prs)

"Mapman,

What are you using for speakers and pre into the Bel canto's."

Pre-amp is Audio Research sp16.

Speakers are OHM Walsh 5 Series 3, OHM 100 Series 3, OHM L and Dynaudio Contour 1.3 mkii.

All are shown in my system listing.

Each speaker pair is in a different room connected to the same core electronics (including Bel canto Ref1000 mkii mono blocks) via in-wall wiring that I had run when the house was built. I use a Niles speaker switch off the monoblocks to switch individual speaker pairs/rooms on and off as needed.

I used to have a pair of larger maggies in my system for years. The OHM Walsh 5s replaced those in my larger room. I would really like to hear those again now using the Bel Cantos. I used a 360w/ch Carver m4.0t with the Maggies back then an that was not a bad combo. The carver amp did not cut it with the OHM Walshes though. Not a lot of current and fairly low damping factor despite plenty of watts led to a comparably thin sound with those.

I would urge all class D owners to find an AN DAC to try. My class D set up spits out all oversampling or up-sampling players. I haven't had one here that doesn't fall far short of a 1-sampling player or DAC.