@ricevs Another digital Class D amp (power DAC) is the Exogal Comet/Ion from the folks who developed one of the first power DACs, ex-Wadia engineers. The Comet/Ion is very transparent, dead neutral, and dynamically expressive. Active speakers have many advantages including no passive xover components and amps chosen to match the needs of their drivers, plus they can also add digital room equalization, listen to speakers from Eikon, Dutch & Dutch, and the KEF LS60s. Digital Class D has the potential to push active speaker systems closer to the goal while keeping costs in check, simplifying circuitry, and easily integrating streaming, active xovers and EQ, I hope many manufacturers take note and develop speaker systems incorporating these ideas.
The revolution has begun!
Digital amps along with digital xovers are the future.....and you can have it NOW. I am not going to say that a $1400 Peachtree GaN1 amp will sound better than a $120K MSB Select, $145K Boulder Preamp and Bouder $250K mono blocks with $20K worth of cables in between (over half a million plus power cords and amp stands)......but it did beat the Holo May KTE with the Holo Serene Pre and Kinki B7 mono blocks with $1000 worth of interconnects ($13k). So what will it take to beat this $200 digital board from Elegant Audio Solutions powered from a $100 switching power supply? With a digital amp you do not need a DAC or a preamp or regular amp with feedback, tubes, or transistors. With digital amps you can bi or triamp your speaker drivers directly without the distortion of passive components. In fact, I would bet that if you bought two GaN 1 amps, bought the $600 digital xover from minisdp (with great linear supply and great coax cables) and biamped some drivers directly that it would sound better than most $50K systems. You could get 2 12 inch woofs and mount them on an open baffle and put a beryllium tweenter on top and set the xover to 1K or less (48db per octave). You hardwire your speaker cable to the woofers voice coil wires and use Music Purifiers and Ground Enhancers on each driver.....Bybee Clarifiers on the back of the woofer magnets.......speaker wires hardwired via plastic clamps into the amps (no binding posts or spades allowed here!). Of course, you can triamp.....and manufacturers will soon have powered digital speaker so all you will need is a source.
There will be other manufacturers designing and building digital amps that will (no doubt) be better than the EAS boards.....but they will come at a price. These, yet to be made digital amps will blow the industry wide open....as no more big heavy expensive boxes will ever need to be purchased......but what EAS has not is fantastic. When I do some mods to the Peachtree amp next month it should get a step or two better. Have fun!
http://tweakaudio.com/EVS-2/The_Audio_Revolution_has_begun.html
I have started a webpage about all this and more and will be updating it continuously.