What is your favorite Class D amp?


Moving to a new home with a smaller dedicated listening room has caused me to rethink my entire system.  I have always been a fan of EL34 tube amps and presently have a Primaluna HP (4 tubes per channel), but the size and heat make this a bit more difficult in my new set up.  So I have been thinking about going with a smaller, less hot class D amp.  But being a tube guy, I have never seriously looked into or listen to these amps.

so what is your favorite class D amp?  New or used, in the 5k range, but could go up to 10k.  Preamp is a Conrad Johnson ET-7.  Speaker will be in the monitor/mini-monitor class (so I don’t need high power for a smallish room) but have not made my final decision on speakers as the amp/speaker synergy makes this kind of a joint decision.

I purposely asked for “favorite” to be a bit more open in your relies.

thanks, Bill

meiatflask

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.

what-is-your-favorite-class-d-amp?

i certainly haven’t covered the waterfront on this subject ... in particular i have not had the pleasure of trying ralph’s (@atmasphere) recent class d amps

for me i would say the agd audion’s are by a good margin the best sounding ones i have - i also have units from devialet and w4s...