Besides the usual suspects, there are a couple of companies who have taken on some sort of hybrid approach, in some cases closely resembling earlier work by Bob Carver.
NuForce, Yamaha’s EEEngin and NAD which uses a curiously unusual hybrid designed by Hypex. The last is unusual in that all the other amplifiers I know of from Hypex are pure Class D designs. For Bruno to put together something like that for NAD is a fairly rare and obscure thing.
I believe that, like Carver, they rely on Class D to move the voltage railes, and put a relatively small Class-A amplifier between them. This combination has relatively very high efficiency (compared to Class A), small size. On the other hand, things are much more comlpicated, and it is unclear to me that the little Class-A section in the middle can perform much better than the rails.
I will say I’ve grown quite fond of my NAD 3020D though. :) Also, NAD uses a variety of approaches to their Class D amps, relying on nCore for HT amps for instance, so I'm not making blanket claims for NAD here.
Best,
E
NuForce, Yamaha’s EEEngin and NAD which uses a curiously unusual hybrid designed by Hypex. The last is unusual in that all the other amplifiers I know of from Hypex are pure Class D designs. For Bruno to put together something like that for NAD is a fairly rare and obscure thing.
I believe that, like Carver, they rely on Class D to move the voltage railes, and put a relatively small Class-A amplifier between them. This combination has relatively very high efficiency (compared to Class A), small size. On the other hand, things are much more comlpicated, and it is unclear to me that the little Class-A section in the middle can perform much better than the rails.
I will say I’ve grown quite fond of my NAD 3020D though. :) Also, NAD uses a variety of approaches to their Class D amps, relying on nCore for HT amps for instance, so I'm not making blanket claims for NAD here.
Best,
E