What is your favorite Class D amp?

@atmasphere wrote:

The supply is rated 48V @5A. Look at the 4 Ohm power rated with this supply. It’s 240W, the same rating as the output of the supply! By that metric the amplifier is 100% efficient. Since that isn’t so, its pretty obvious that things aren’t going to measure up as claimed. 

[...] I’d be curious to see how this amp holds up running at full power with the 10A supply. 

Well, according to Douk’s product page, with the 10A power supply the amp makes 250w + 250w @ 4 ohm.

In other words, it takes in 480W but outputs 500W. Magic! 😃

This brings up a great point, namely that manufacturers’ power claims and ratings should be taken with a grain of salt until they’re carefully looked into. You’d expect these kinds of shenanigans from Douk or other entry-level brands out of China, but wannabe high-end manufacturers like NAD play even worse games.

For instance, Bob Carver makes (made?) a very nice-looking tube amp rated 75wpc, but its output transformers were so small there was just no way, and sure enough ASR measured it clipping at something like 17 watts.

You’d think ASR would have reviewed the Douk but sadly they haven’t. That might have shed some light on its real power and THD+N numbers.

But as I said when this first came up, amps like this challenge stuff costing a lot more.

That’s for sure! Though as you’ve stated PSU quality is key, and in that price range a good PSU can easily cost more than the amp it powers.

@devinplombier Yes, it seems we're on the same page :)

Carver also made one called the cube. Supposed to be 400W  of power 200wpc. It was small, and light weight, maybe 6 or 8 inches square and had more like 40Watts, if that. A friend of mine bought one and brought it over to demo on my system. It was pathetic. 

devinplombier, the TDA3255 is no where near the 250 watt rating per module  Input is 240 watts per pair. Efficiency is 80%. Output is 192 watts or 96 watts per module. However 80% efficiency may be doubtful. I say each module provides 65 watts RMS per channel and I use about 5 watts average for listening. No matter what some others stated distortion is about 1% at the 65 watts per channel.

The Douk NS-13G will sound as good as expensive amps till your speakers exceed at least $2K. Then you may hear some improvement with the expensive amps and speakers, Unlike the Douk some amps do not have tone controls to tune your speakers response.

@jimbennet 

Based on that chip’s datasheet, I don’t disagree that the Douk amp should be able to push 60wpc at less than 1% distortion. 

Does it sound good doing it? I’ll take your word for it :)

Edit: I can imagine the Douk doing a decent job of driving entry-level, 2-way ported bookshelf speakers, that sort of thing. But for $2000 as you mentioned, you can get into some pretty serious vintage speakers that would cause the Douk to self-immolate in short order. In fairness, I've never auditioned the Douk.