Zhanming057
500+ Head-Fier
I know that people have had good experiences with the Esoteric I03, which is class D but with an old-fashioned linear power supply (and an extremely, extremely good one at that). Esoteric also does a huge amount of class D R&D in-house and they claim that 10,000 hours of real listening feedback goes into the tuning profile of their Class D offerings. Not having heard any Ncore amps with the SR1a's, I can't say this for certain, but on the 1266 phi, the Ncore amps that I have tried aren't nearly as good as the I03. You would be very hard pressed to distinguish the I03 from a 100w pure class A monoblock, and I wonder if part of it is the combination of extensively-tuned Class D with a costly power delivery setup on par with many $30k+ amps.
As mentioned in the reply above, the SR1a's require both max power and dynamics in output, and the part that I am less sure about is how well the amp responds to a large increase or decrease in load. That might be where the imaging problem is coming from. Pure Class A is largely an academic study and I would argue that unless you're shopping at a truly cost-no-object level, A/B or even an extremely well designed D amp allows for better components when the design is cost-constrained. The concern with the M22 isn't that it's cheaping out on components but that its design optimizes for keeping the size and heat dispersion low for a large amount of rated output, at the cost of important features for coherence with the SR1a's.
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