I recently built a second system and after much reading and research bought D-Sonics M3A-1500 mono blocks. I ran them for about 300 hours using a SS Primare pre I had and driving a new pair of Maggie 3.7i's. The amps and Maggies both require significant run in time. I was very impressed with SQ....huge open soundstage....bass took some time to arrive but it is now present and impressive. HF still needs to open up a bit more but getting there. With burn in 90% there I swapped out the Primare with a McIntosh C2300 tube pre amp...at first pretty disappointing and a bit lifeless but let it run in for 24 hours and boy am I glad I waited. Very impressive. Huge open, layered and deep soundstage. Not as highly resolving or detailed and focused as my reference rig, but at 1/5th the cost I'm totally happy and I'm still tweaking the speaker placement. These class D amps are terrific. Dead quiet, wonderfully balanced top to bottom....nothing close to "bright". Huge open soundstage with great sonic images. Crazy power. Very musical. Someone above noted that on great recordings SQ is wonderful and even poor recordings sound great. I found that to be true. Hard to believe at $2,750. for the pair.
Time to buy a class D amp?
Will some new class D amplifiers outperforming the current ones appear soon
(the newest ones i know were released a few years ago)?
Class D amps attract me as I consider them the most ecological ones with obvious non-auditionable benefits.
I have no doubts that they posses the maximum ratio performance/sound quality among the amplifiers of all classes.
At the same time, the sound quality the class D amplifiers that I have auditioned produce, although is quite good,
but not yet ideal (for my taste).
I use PS Audio Stellar S300 amp with PS audio Gain Cell pre/DAC with Thiel CS 3.6 speakers in one of my systems.
The sound is ok (deep bass, clear soundstage) but not perfect (a bit bright and somehow dry, lacking warmness which might be more or less ok for rock but not for jazz music).
I wonder if there are softer sounding class D amps with the same or better details and resolution. Considering two reasonable (as to the budget) choices for test, Red Dragon S500 and Digital Audio Company's
Cherry 2 (or Maraschino monoblocks), did anybody compare these two?