Oh how I wish Class D amps ...

I am way over my head here with the techincal issues but I have owned Sonic Fronteirs Power 3 amps with KT88s for years before I switched to Spectron monoblocks. I due love the midrange of the KT88s but I feel the transparency is better in the Spectron class D. The amps both have different sounds and I would never confuse one for the other. There is a certain sparkle with tubes which I feel like I miss with my old tube amps.

People please stop using the phrase digital amplifier. There is NOTHING digital about class D.

This from a person who has borrowed my source duo. He has the same amps and preamp as I.

"I have been listening all morning and YES!!! It is incredible. It is unreal how good the Flatfish and the Audio note sounds. It has the right amount of ambience, air, staging. Bass is beyond description. Very tuneful and meaty with right amount of pitch definition. Vocal is NIRVANA to listen to. Nothing is exaggerated. No wonder you have been screaming how good your system sounds, unfortunately mostly to unbelievers. Oh well, Too bad they missed out big time. Top end is so exxxxxquisite...."

Ralph do you think that a digital amp will ever be able to capture what tubes can do;personally I do not;but it is fun to listen and compare.

One thing to be careful about is reliance on simple measurements such as frequency response, or THD.

Ideally, a measurement such as EVM that is used in the wireless industry would be a more appropriate measure of the quality of the amplifier.

One example of the problem with measurements like THD is that its easy to crank up the amount of feedback to create good THD measurements. However that will smudge out the transients in a signal and cause a dull lifeless sound. That is why on Class A/AB designs the better sounding amps tend to be the ones with zero global feedback.

Going back to Class D designs, my experience with several ICE amplifiers has been they tend to distort the transients - particularly the quieter signal levels. Perhaps this is due to the deadband issue that is described on the Mark Levinson website - I don't know. Its a type of digital nonlinear effect and so can't be described by simple 2nd order/3rd order products.

I recently got a Spectron digital amp, and haven't noticed this issue at all so far, although I have been using it in balanced mode, which perhaps serves to reduce the effect to the point of not being noticeable.

I am also intrigued by the idea of the Devialet amp - which combines class A with a class D to capture accurate transients - although I have yet to hear one.