ICE Amps for classical music?

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.

I've been more than quite musically satisfied (including a dozen or so listeners) with my AD1865N 1.0 NOS Dac to 6SN7-based TRL pre into NuForce monos, tons of reserve dynamics, liquid warmth and huge open staging.

I'm very happy with the mhdt DACs as well. These also do no upsampling.

I do not regard up-sampling as categorically bad however. It can be hit or miss depending on how done like most things.