For me, the closest thing I know of in this regard is things I have read in a Swedish forum from guys who are involved with the Swedish Audio Society (Ljudtekniska sällskapet). It's an enthusiast club of audiophiles of an objectivist bent who have been testing audio gear for transparency for many years, using rather elaborate test methods. They publish an excellent magazine, which is one of the few audio publications I bother reading, except for ASR and a couple of German audio magazines.
Lately they've mostly measured and listened to dacs. Results are pretty consistent with Amir's findings here. Quite a lot of the dacs go un-detected in their tests, including some rather cheap ones. But they have also been able to detect subtle audible colorations in some of the dacs they have tested, which suprised me at first. Some of the guys have stated online that they have done basic blind listening tests on "well-regarded class d amps", without specifying which, and that they have always detected some coloration, and have therefore not found it worthwhile to do further testing.
But this is very anecdotal of course, and until they publish any full tests in their magazine I'm not sure how much I trust those reports. My impression is that audio objectivists all over the world have jumped on the class d train by now, and that it's mostly the Swedish objectivists and a few engineers like Benchmark who claim that class AB or class A still remains superior.
I guess a big question is which "well-regarded class D amps" they are talking about.. Is their magazine available online or only in print form? And which German mags/sites do you recommend? I live here but have never looked into it much.
