Notes on Schiit Audio and Class D...
2020 May 16
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...bable-start-up.701900/page-3947#post-15618978
Roy G. Biv said:
That post was almost exactly 6 years ago. (Page 73 if anyone is curious).
I've done very little auditioning of new gear since that post, but there have been some positive reviews of Class D amps in the media recently. For example, the most recent issue of Stereophile has a review of the Bel Canto e1X ($6K) that was very positive. So I'll bet Jason & Mike are at least keeping an eye on the technology for future products.
As an aside, the word "barf" shows up in a surprisingly large number of posts.
valiant66 said:
That's a great question - I've been wondering the same thing.
Jason made an offhand comment a while back that he was rethinking his disdain for class D - that things were improving on that front.
None of us followed up on it, and I don't remember where he made the comment.
But at the time I thought that Mike's prowess with digital and Jason's experience with analogue could make for a very interesting class D product...
.
RE: Class D
I found this commentary (bold added):
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...bable-start-up.701900/page-2936#post-14791506
2019 Chapter 4: The Ragnaroks That Weren’t
...
"And, of course, we got feedback from people who owned Ragnarok, so we could add some additional issues to the list:
- They didn’t like how big it was
- Or how hot it ran
- Or that the single-ended output was weaker/different than balanced
The first issue—size—makes a bit more sense when you think of Ragnarok as a rack product, not a desk product. I was frankly surprised how many people were using Ragnaroks on desks. That’s a bit nuts. And Ragnarok really needed its size for the big transformer and to dissipate heat. So a small Ragnarok was never in the cards. I
thought briefly about doing a “Ragnarok Mini” with Class D…and then listened to some available
Class D implementations…and then realized the problem with
Class D is really output filtering and how it responds to different speaker impedances…and then realized this was a much bigger project and put it aside."
2020 May 17
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...bable-start-up.701900/page-3948#post-15620230
roadcykler said:
Question for Jason or whomever else may know. I'm almost half way through the Schiit Happened book and in one of the chapters, there was stuff about the various type of amps, A, A/B, etc and in the short paragraph about Class D amps, it ended with "barf." Is that still the thought with those or have they improved and are now considered worthy of use? It seems more companies are using that, likely because of cost and getting a lot of wpc out of a small platform, but I also know that USB wasn't highly thought of either and things changed (improved) and now it's used extensively.
Class D is not for us. One of the problems, besides the low frequencies Class D operate at, is the output filtering really needs to be tailored to the load. Putting
Class D inside a speaker could be good, because you can tailor the output filtering to the load. Making a general purpose
Class D that works on everything is a whole different ball game. And forget higher than first-order filters, the variation would be far, far worse. We played with GaN for higher frequencies, we played with filtering, we measured, we listened...and the result is that
Class D projects are dead here. We are now working on alternate high-efficiency topologies.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...bable-start-up.701900/page-3948#post-15620253
PS Audio discussed Class D a while back:
https://www.psaudio.com/askpaul/the-future-of-class-d/. The comments are interesting, including the reference to the work Axign has done (
https://www.axign.nl). I
n addition to Bel Canto, other audio manufacturers (Wyred4Sound comes to mind) have designed and produced highly-regarded Class D amps.
