OK, finally had some time to evaluate the Devialet. The company was kind enough to loan us this unit which we appreciated very much.
We made the comparison against three other amps we had on hand: Mark Levinson No 53 mono blocks and 532 reference, plus a Crown Xti 4000 (?). The 53 and Crown are Class I (interleaved class D) with the 532 being all linear. Price wise, the 532 is the closest with the crown being much cheaper and 53 much more expensive.
Feed was a high-quality USB to S/PDIF converter (Audiophilleo) from a music server and analog out from our Berkeley alpha DAC. Most of the tests were done with the former, feeding the Devialet with digital signal. Speakers were Revel Salon 2s and Paradigm Signature S8s.
Here is what we walked away with:
+ Gorgeous design. Even better once you power it on. Very nice display on top. The remote has a super nice feel.
+ Commanding control of the bass. The salon 2s need lots of power to get them to produce tight bass and this box did it. If this is what you are looking for, this amp can deliver. The high efficiency of these digital amps really comes into play in this area. There is no substitute for extracting the max juice out of the wall outlet and delivering it to the speaker.
To wit, both No 53 and Crown provided the same tight and powerful bass. The 532 while also quite good, had slightly softer impact in its bass response.
+ The integration is quite nice, having DAC, pre-amp and power all in one box. It took more pieces to simulate the same with the other solutions.
- Unfortunately, once we move above the bass, as with most class D amps, performance starts to drop. The highs were especially grungy with Devialet. Ambiance was lost and sound become flatter.
- Wanting to separate the DAC performance, we ran the unit using analog connection from our Berkeley DAC. It made very little difference in the performance of it.
To provide overall context, the 53 was hugely in front of it in performance. It was not a fair race at all between the two. The 53 performance stays at top regardless of what you throw at it, while also having the benefit of incredible bass performance.
The 532 was also beautifully nice sounding all around, only beat on tightness of bass by Davialet.
I should mention that with the right material this device can sound incredible. Indeed, that was my first experience with it: a heavy drum piece by the Marsalis family. It was everything you wanted it to be. Also, this device has a customizable feature using an SD card. We tested it with the default program delivered to us. Perhaps with a different config file it would perform better.
Again, this was all sighted testing and it is entirely possible we were biased by the much larger boxes connected to speaker wires
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One idea here might be to use this system in bi-amp configuration, with another amp driving the mid to high frequencies. Since not as much power is required there, a tube amp or small solid state amp will do the job. In that sense, having a high-pass output from the amp would come in handy.