Digital Amps? Marketing Hype?

Well, if you do a little research, you will find that most digital amps are, in fact, class D switching amps and they work fairly well for analog audio. In fact, I find the Bel Canto eVo amps quite excellent regardless of their technology. There are also exceptions, like the TacT and the Spectron, which will accept a digitial signal directly. So, it's not just marketing hype.

As for digital speakers, again, you have to define what you mean. At the moment, I know of NO digital speakers on the market. What I do see are two things which you might be thinking of. 1)Speakers that will accept a digital input like the Meridian DSP series have in-built digital eq/crossover and amps and they are quite good, in general. 2)The so-called 'digital ready' speakers which are marketing hype.

What stimulated your annoyance?

The other side of this is a form of hype in the so called "digital ready" products. pure marketing hype.
supposedly these products are either powerful enough or 'good enough' for digital front ends. Ha hah ha...

There is digital hype, and there is analog hype, and it seems to me that I hear a lot more of the latter. Each technology has a few real advantages, and thousands of myths.

My work involves servo-controlled gimbals of a missile guidance system, and let me tell you that the digital amplifiers in the latest system run circles around the old analog amplifiers. So far my audio amplifiers are analog. One of the advantages of digital technology is circuit simplicity and low cost, but, because it's new, manufacturers have not passed the low cost benefit on to the consumer. Not yet.

My basic electronics are rusty, but as i recall amplifiers were classed by the amount on time they conducted during a single cycle of the input waveform (a sinusoid for simplicity's sake). The term digital implies discrete states,on/off, in this case the output device (tube/transistor). It may only be semantics we are arguing, but if so, then only class A amps can be truly be called analog since all other classes are on/off for portions of the cycle. In this sense, they are digital; however, by convention, they have never been described as 'digital'.
It seemed to me to describe an amplifier as digital was to suggest a completely new design that did not encompass the class designations as generally accepted.
So you are right Kr4, I do need to do some research; however, it seems to me that class D amps are not digital but rather 'described' as such. I am not familiar with the digital ammps you mentioned, but it seems they behave as DAC's. That is, they pesent to the speaker load a signal which approximates an analog signal. It is the physical limitations of the drivers (load) which actaully produce an analog signal. Your thoughts?