I don't believe everybody you know can hear a difference. I don't believe that PA crowd was transporting a ton of amps requiring additional portable generators costing $$$$.
Yeah….
Ok. Let me dumb this down. Back in the day, before lightweight and efficient class D amplifiers were a thing, huge touring acts used to bring 40 racks of massive Class A/B, G, H amplifiers to run their subwoofers.
As high performance class D amplifiers were introduced, they were able to replace their 4+ U legacy amps with 1-2u class D amps. The loss of sustained output power (irrelevant for anything but electronic music) was easily offset with just adding more amplifiers (now negligible rack space) and the efficiency boost made power requirements practically irrelevant. This saved them a lot of money on freight costs, generator rental, labor, and power distro.
So they sold off their old Class A/B/G/H amps. Then it was shown that these older, inefficient, and heavy amplifiers could sustain constant output far more consistently than something like a Powersoft K10. So individuals running (comparatively) small systems which only need 1-2racks of amps, purchased them used for dirt cheap, and got the benefit of fantastic sustained output with the caveats of higher weight and power draw (both irrelevant on smaller scale PAs).
To refute your point of “it’s not subjectively audible” lets look at the data in the paper I cited in my original post. After 1 second of sustained output, a K10 will lose 4.7db of output. After 11s it will lose 7.6db. If that is not subjectively audible to you I suggest you get your ears checked.
Hope that’s digestible enough for you. I am a professional in the live entertainment field and have zero allegiances with any manufactures or companies. Just because someone has knowledge of objectively proven performance, doesn’t mean they are an employee of a company.
For what it’s worth I use modern Class D amps exclusively at work and one of the main challenges in system deployment (especially in electronic music with massively long sustained notes) is to ensure you have enough amplifiers that they never go into power sag/compression. I.e we want all amplifiers to only need to output what their max power draw * efficiency factor is. Any more than that we start to get into output sag as the power supplies cannot keep up which ruins tonality of the system
Your accusation of a troll is ironic because statements such as “I don’t believe you” are much more in line with troll behavior than anything I said.