Pre/Power Amplifiers

In my Welcome page [HFN Jun ’25] I touched upon the reliability of amplifier manufacturers’ power specifications, but not those that rate their amps to within the skin of their transistors, with a following wind and the maximum possible AC mains voltage. No... I was talking about those that either approach specification with a (small ‘c’) conservatism or, equally likely, where there’s a breakdown in communication between the engineering and marketing departments.

Either way it results in inaccurate power ratings being propagated as ‘facts’ by the online herd, potentially leading to enthusiasts overlooking or discounting models that do not meet a particular performance threshold for their partnering loudspeakers.

Pass Labs is just one of those brands that runs the risk of being overlooked for ‘lack of power’. That would be unfortunate, and a mistake, because its ratings regularly fail to reflect the true speaker-wrestling grunt of its amplifiers. Just as the X150.5 was rated at 150W but delivered 250W/8ohm [HFN Feb ’07], the 60W-spec’d XA60.5 delivered 129W/8ohm [HFN Apr ’10] and the INT-25 was rated at 25W but maintained 68W/8ohm, so too does the XA30.8 smash both specification [see PM's Lab Report] and expectation... PM