Speaker Interface
Interconnects and Speaker Cables
X1000.5 Owners Manual
The Pass Laboratories™ X1000.5 is optimized for loads nominally rated at 4 ohms and above. You can run the amplifiers into a lower nominal impedance without difficulty, and we are not aware of a speaker on the market that presents unusual difficulty with these am- plifiers.
The X.5 series amplifiers do not care particularly about the reactivity of the load. Reactive loads typically will have slightly less distortion at a given voltage/current level than resistive loads, but will make the amplifier run a little hotter. The X.5 circuit was designed to be quite happy driving electrostatic and other difficult speakers.
When driving
We have a general recommendation about interconnects, which is that they should cost less than the amplifier, and be flexible enough to work with. We have tried a lot of products and most of them work well, but as a practical matter we cannot make blanket recommendations.
The amplifier is not sensitive to source interconnects or ground loops. It is also not sensitive to radio frequency pickup, which allows some flexibility in choosing source interconnects without shields, though shields are always in good taste.
We prefer speaker cables that are thick and short. Silver and copper are the preferred metals. If you find any cable made of gold, please gift us a couple hundred meters.
Fortunately the amplifier is not sensitive to the capacitive/inductive character of some of the specialty speaker cables, so feel free to ex- periment.
We have found that about 90 per cent of bad sounding cables are in reality bad sounding connections, and we recommend that special at-
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