Good class Ds are not that cheap. Hypex and now Purifi based amps are good but not what I’d call cheap. Evenso lots of people like AB amps and some even like the old A amps fooling around with their “valves”.

My SMSL SA-50 sounds an order of magnitude (in price) better than my Marantz PM68 and costs an order of magnitude less - in other words, it sounds fantastic and it was cheap. Some of the early carriers of class D hype (Tripath based) were even cheaper. A good chip and a bunch of quality passives don't need to be that expensive.

So I'm more concerned about Samsung owning B&W (there is no real substitute for good speakers) than Marantz and Denon. It seems like really good amps can be made by sticking to class D chip application notes these days.

The accepted wisdom in the audiophile community is you get what you pay for, i.e. a good implementation of any given amp topology remains a good implementation regardless of the topology. Once you get to a certain $$$ range, the sound of tube amps and transistor amps (and class D amps I might add) begins to converge.