Class D Technology

seanhesist I wouldn't call Merrill amps clones. It’s like baking a cake, taking ingredients and doing your own implementation to get the taste/sound you want. I know Merrill also uses high end fuses and yes I’ve heard them and they are super sounding amps. I could not detect any faults but will say it was mated to a tube pre-amp which can make or break the sound of some class D amps IMO. I'm now a believer.

Quite some years ago, I purchased a pair of Bel Canto REF-1000.

It ended up being my absolute worst purchase in my 30+ years in this hobby.

I understand of course that those class "D" designs have much improved since.

Still, I could not bring myself even today to even remotely give D another shot.

"It’s like baking a cake"

Actually, it’s more like frosting a cake that someone else baked.

When I owned the Atsah’s (same Hypex Ncore modules as the Veritas, also in milled aluminum boxes) I had the opportunity to try different wiring harnesses between boards and from the boards to the binding posts. I tried high quality wire from Harmonic Technology (individually insulated multiple strands of OCC copper), Jupiter (high quality copper in cotton) and others and the differences between changing about 5 inches of wire did not even approach the difference between chocolate and vanilla frosting on the cake. I agree Cardas wire is good (I have Lundahl transformers using Cardas wire that sound very good) but I doubt it changes the basic signature of the amplifiers, and certainly no more than changing speaker cables.

One thing Merrill does that I like is they apparently (not confirmed because I know of no posted pictures of the insides of Merrill’s amps) solder the wire directly to the boards rather than use the generic plastic connectors intended for the Hypex boards. However, I would have an issue owning a component where the manufacturer is so concerned with people looking at how it is constructed that they would not allow the end-user/owner to even open the box to change the fuse.

A better analogy,at least in teh case of newer BEl Canto amps, is souping up the engine.

With ref1000m amps, they add custom input board for better integration with tube pre-amps and a beefed up powersupply board.

Original ref1000 was just vanilla Icepower in a nice box. I would not even consider using that with a higher output impedance tube pre-amp.

Just goes to show not all Class D is equal, even newer ones so gotta be careful about generalizing there.