It sounds like you've already set your mind on Class D and Benchmark shouldn't have been a part of the original question.
No, I really didn't. In fact my bias has been towards Class AB. I'm in my early '50s so my formative years in hi-fi, from my teens through my '30s, were all about Class A and AB. I've only ever owned Class AB amps, and massive linear PSUs (preferably toroidals), huge heatsinks, mosfets, and 50-lb amps are types of signs of quality I've been accustomed to for decades.
It's taken me some time - and reading a lot of Amir's Class D amp tests and the ensuing threads here carefully - to get comfortable with Class D as a concept, in particular how the switching noise is handled, and the basic notion that a lightweight amp can produce not only lots of watts, but have significant current-handling capacity like the heavy iron of old. It's literally been a years-long process for me (albeit a casual and fun one) to educate myself enough about the topology where I feel I can make a sufficiently informed decision. Even 2-3 months ago, getting an NCore or Purifi-based amp was not quite something I could really see myself doing.
If the Benchmark amp were $1500 or $1800, maybe even $2000, it would be an instant buy for me - I probably wouldn't have looked at anything else. And if my income were 20-30% higher, and we were not in a global pandemic that threatens future employment and the value of one's investments and assets, I might even have snapped up the Benchmark no questions asked at $3k.
But in the reality I'm in, and being a member of this site, believing in the validity of measurements, and having a decent sense of the limits of audibility for a speaker-amp use case (as opposed to headphones) in a typical room, I could not ignore the value proposition of the better Class D options.
I've been happily living with a 25-year old Class AB amp that I bought about 6 years ago, which is rated at 0.18% THD, which produces a low-level hiss through the speakers (albeit audible only during silence and within a foot or two of the speaker), and which has no speaker protection. A modern, Class D amp based on an exceptionally well-measuring module, in what appears to be a nicely-built implementation, represents such a step up from what I have that it became difficult to justify spending 2-1/4 times as much for an amp that would likely give me no audible additional improvement compared to the Class D.
. So I don't have to send the unit back to the company (abroad) for installing a new one. I simply request a new module without any hurry and the amp won't leave my home at all and no down time also while waiting for the module (just swap a few cables to the spare one). Replacement of the unit, if you want to do that (it can be shelved also) takes 10 minutes, at the most.
