Class D Amplification Announcement

At what point do you guys say that your gear is "close enough" and start listening to music intentionally?

I have recordings I recorded and mastered. I was there at the musical event. I use these recordings for reference, since I was there. I recommend anyone who really wants to compare against the live performance to get a set of good mics and a decent recorder, then get out there and make recordings- very helpful for knowing what is right and what isn’t.

Once you get that part right then you can listen to other recordings on the same system to see how they are rendered. That is really the only way I’ve found to get at ’the absolute sound’.

there is no top sparkle, midrange has never had lively crunch as A or AB no matter how many times you sell your selves they are so awesome, better than class A or AB,                ................Nobody says it's better than A- A/B...

Really? We've been making class A amplifiers for 49 years. While I am certainly not talking about all class D amplifiers, we feel that our class D amps sound better than our class A amps in that they are just as smooth in the mids and highs but exhibit greater detail in the rear of the soundstage (owing to lower distortion). FWIW our class A amps (which are triode OTLs) have been getting nice reviews and awards in the high end press for decades now.

Ralph, could this have been possible without the GAN ? If so, why wait so long ?

Yes. There's a lot of noise around the 'sound' of class D amps on the internet (IME class D amps can vary in sound quite dramatically, more so than the sound of various tube amps can vary). This is for various reasons- in ability to really implement the use of existing modules, poor power supply design, as well as modules that don't have good (meaning 'musical') distortion spectra; all these things made it hard to know how far class D as a technology had really come. I started to sort that out about 6 years ago and realized that we had better get going or be left behind.

The reason why I think more manufacturers will be using their resources in developing Digital and even lower cost Class D amps is in part due to the energy efficiency.

The reason we did it is because the switching nature of the class allows the designer to be freed from a lot of the distortion sources that cause solid state (AB designs) to sound bright and harsh. In that regard, the same reason we've made tube amps for the last 49 years.