You really do not have to defend your business every time someone speaks about liking SS kit better than tube kit.
I may be going out on a limb here... but I would presume that you never sat down and gave a serious listen to the likes, of say, a Merrill Audio Veritas mono block amp. If you can ever get the opportunity to hear them,I think you will be picking your jaw up off the floor...
Your presumption is incorrect- believe it or not what is actually " defending my business" is actually done by auditioning products like these and then assessing the threat. If you think about you will see that no business in high end can really exist in a vacuum (if you will pardon the expression...). We assess a lot of technologies to try to understand how that might affect us in the future- I would think anyone in it for the long haul would do just that!
Further, its my opinion that you didn't read my posts all that carefully. No worries- but read this one, because it explains in greater depth what I am actually thinking.
First- Its not like we can't make class D amps; we've been looking into it for over 10 years.
But more to the point I've not seen Class D threatening conventional tube amps let alone ours (which are less conventional)- **so far**. What I **do** see (or hear, as the case may be) is that class D has effectively supplanted the traditional solid state design in all but the very best of the traditional designs (which might be a misnomer, as the best solid state amps I am thinking of are leading edge and really are not that traditional). Otherwise what it still boils down to is still just about the same old tube vs transistor argument which has been there all along, although the goal posts have moved about somewhat.
Those of you who are familiar with price performance curves will understand why this is so, and thus is likely to be so for quite some time. What the question really becomes is what part of the price performance curve (for more understanding, google 'technology S curve') class D is on right now.
Its my surmise that class D is nearing or at the top of the most vertical part of the curve. This suggests that the technology is reaching maturity. This is certainly what its advocates would like us to believe! If this is so, then what follows are incremental improvements.
FWIW, transformer-coupled tube amps are a very mature technology so improvements over the last few decades have been fairly slight.
Now if you have been following along, if my surmise is correct than this debate will be on-going possibly for decades. If my surmise is incorrect, then class D is a bit lower on its ascendancy of the technology S curve. IOW, breakthroughs are still possible, causing the technology to achieve much greater performance than is available right now.
So which is it? The answer is we don't know. But its been around for a while and its clear that class D is much much better now than it was even just 10 years ago.
So I am sticking to my position, which is not based on a personal bias or some need to 'defend my business' that it is possible for class D to surpass not only traditional solid state but also tubes, **but the latter day has yet to arrive**. But I'm not ruling that out as one can see from my prior posts.
