New amp being touted as among the best ever......

Don't know about the amp, but you gotta love the barely intelligable "spokes-chick" in the video.

It has a forward looking, unique design and is expensive.

It probably sounds very good also but I have not read anything yet that makes me believe it outperforms the competition on sound quality alone.

Also not sure about the value proposition.

It should appeal to those with the bucks that want something that performs well and is a little different.

I do not seeany details about the class A/D design and how that works, so I am suspicious, but I suspect it should appeal to Class A fans that are otherwise shy about anything with the word "digital" or "switching" in its design even if it turns out to be more about semantics than actual technical innovation.

Wait a few years and there will be more smaller gadgets to choose from with equally good sound and modern features for considerably less I will wager.

Maybe I do not remember correctly however, I seem to recall that this amp converts to digital what comes in the analogue inputs. That seems to be very strange. Can anyone explain why this is done?

Esmith,

I think it is a true digital amp meaning that a digital rather than analog signal is processed internally by the amp section to then drive the speakers.

For that to happen, any analog signals input must first be converted to digital internally.

The combo of being a true digital amp with using a hybrid Class A and Class D amp section where the Class A apparently drives the high frequencies would seem to be a very innovative approach that I would like to hear. A sophisticated digital filtering and analog cross over circuit would be needed internally as well to pull this off I would think.

Mapman, thanks. I still think it's odd that an amp will take the analogue signal produced from a DSD recording and digitize it at 96khz in order to amplify it. That seems like a reduction. Additionally, many of us remember from the days of audio cassettes, that recordings of recordings tend to degrade the sound quality.