A few comments on the thread:
Yes, overall, I like the t-amps quite a bit. I recently got a cheap t-amp for like $20 for background listening in the living room and it works great and has a very small footprint.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190359475356For several years, I've owned a Trends TA-10.1:
http://www.tnt-audio.com/ampli/trends_ta10_e.htmlhttp://www.sixmoons.com/audioreviews/trends/ta10.htmlhttp://www.trendsaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37&Itemid=28To be fair, this is the one Tim borrowed, and it is quite a bit more expensive than the Sonic T-amp, though both are based on the same tripath chip. The Trends though is supposed to have much better capacitors, air core inductors, etc, and is supposed to be a better design. I think the Trends amp sounds great, though I haven't tried a head-to-head with the cheap Lepai amp.
On SPLs: Also, remember that the SPL you get from your stereo drops by 6db with each doubling in distance. Here's a handy calculator:
http://myhometheater.homestead.com/splcalculator.htmlSo I've got my Trends set up as my playback amp for my desktop/home office playback, together with my Soliloquy Sat 5 speakers. The Sat5's are pretty inefficient at 87db, and the Trends TA10 only provides 15w/ch. But for my desktop setup, I'm only 2-3 feet away from the Sat5's. To get the same SPLs out of these speakers at 10 feet as I do with them set up at 3 feet, I'd need a 160 watts/ch amp.
Bottom line, the t-amp may not have enough oomph to drive a whole room unless you have very efficient speakers, but even with pretty inefficient speakers the t-amps do fine for your PC playback system.