Dave Thomas of Stereo Times was listening late one night, with the volume turned well down, when War's "All Day Music" came on through Classé's Delta Mono amplifiers. He was startled by how much low end he heard, then remembered that the amps play their first watts in pure class A. Class A is a way of running an amplifier's output transistors so they never switch off, which costs heat but avoids a small glitch that cooler designs leave where the work is handed between transistors. Classé biases its Delta amps so their first watts stay in class A, and a meter needle left of vertical tells you when they are there. A fan and an aluminum tunnel inside keep the amplifier at a steady temperature. Aron Garrecht of SoundStage! Ultra heard the Delta Mono balance "the audible advantages of tubed and solid-state amplification," and Mark Henninger of HomeTheaterReview found the Delta Stereo so neutral that "the amplifier itself is invisible." Classé suits listeners who want class A sound with the power for difficult speakers.

Start with the Delta Pre, now in Mk II form with HEOS streaming built in, and add either the Delta Stereo or a pair of Delta Monos. Let your speakers decide which. Brand director Dave Nauber told Edgar Kramer of SoundStage! Australia that the Deltas were built to drive very low impedance loads, like the stretches where B&W's 800 Series speakers dip below 4 ohms. Henninger drove B&W 805 D4s in a large room with the Stereo and found his meters mostly stayed in the class A range, and Jerry Del Colliano of Future Audiophile used a Delta with B&W 802 D4s and harder-to-drive Revel 328Be speakers. Each amp weighs about 100 pounds, so plan on two people, and Del Colliano advises leaving an inch or two of air around it in a rack. The Pre's tone controls work in DSP, and its Bypass mode keeps the signal analog. With the Pre and Monos, Thomas replaced seven boxes with three.

Classé's own account of its founding begins with an explosion. In 1979 Mike Viglas, a Greek immigrant in Montréal who loved showing off his high-end system, watched his tube amplifier blow up at a party, and his guests pulled capacitor wadding from their hair. He vowed it would not happen again, which led him to David Reich, a young engineer building his own solid-state amplifiers. Their first product, the DR-2 of 1980, was a 25-watt stereo amp that ran in class A, and the company name is a pun on it. Australian Hi-Fi notes that the final e is sounded, so Classé is said like Class-A. Thomas counts the DR3 VHC among his early favorite amps and remembers Classé as a renegade in a field led by Krell, Audio Research and Jeff Rowland. In 2005 Abbey Road Studios bought 33 CA-M400 monoblocks to drive its B&W 800-series monitors, and the scores for Revenge of the Sith and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were among the first projects on them.