Zu Omen Defs and Ice Amps?

Whats with all these Class D amps. My friends bring them over to my house and say look it weighs almost nothing and it will produce some crazy amount of power like 500 watts per channel. Then they will proceed that it should keep up with my Pass Labs X350.5. The class D does not come close with the most important part the sound quality. Next the Class D will make your ears bleed in the process. The flat tinny sound must be in style these days. All aside my friend has pair of ZU audio Omen Definitions and they sound extremely good with his collection of tube amps; 1) Modified Jolida 502B, 2)Manley Stingray 3)Cary 300B Integrated 4) Modified Dynaco ST 70 with a Dodd Audio Buffer Preamp. All those amps do a great job and hold a class of their own and still kill Class D as for sound quality. Buy decent tube amp and those ZU Omens will sing the way they were designed.

I will throw out a general statement about Class D is mid fi at best. I have listened to way too many Class D amps and to two that have been mentioned in this thread and they have big power but they do not deliver the quality. The problem is that manufacturing good old fashioned power has gotten very expensive here in the USA for the average US citizen. To build a strong Class A or AB amp you need to dissipate a lot of heat and that requires lots of machined aluminum metal, that is very expensive. It was not a problem until the dollar sank and our economy went south. The reason that high efficiency speakers are popular these days is that you can use high quality old fashioned lower power amps and get better sound than what you get from a 1000Watts of negative feedback switching power supply power amp. The manufactures are also struggling to make stuff people can afford. Under normal economic conditions I they would be a place for Class D but it would not be in high end sound systems. I am not saying that Class D is a bad technology what I am saying is that it needs to improve. I remember when I got my first CD player and I had a first pressing of The Police Synchronicity on Vinyl and bought the CD. What a let down the CD was. No one believed me that the vinyl record blew away the CD. My friends thought I was crazy. What was scary is that I had a Yamaha CDX 1100U CD player and a very very cheap Technics belt drive turntable with a cheap Ortofon p mount cartridge that sounded better then the summmer job's wages I saved to buy that Yamaha CD player.