Pass Labs X260.5 owner manual Speaker Interface Interconnects and Speaker Cables

Speaker Interface

Interconnects and Speaker Cables

X260.5 Owners Manual

fier. The positive of the 12 volts DC goes to the red connector. This connection has an actual operating range of about 9 volts to 15 volts at a current draw of approximately 5.0mA. This switching will over- ride the front panel button, so if you want the front panel button to operate, leave the rear connection open.

So much for the most essential information.

The Pass Laboratories™ X260.5 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 amplifiers.

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 ampli- fier run a little hotter. The X.5 circuit was designed to be quite happy driving electrostatic and other difficult speakers.

When driving transformer-coupled loads directly, as in some electrostat- ic and ribbon designs, some attention must be paid to the DC character of the situation. If the transformer primary is being driven raw with no protection from DC and your source has DC voltage, or in cases where the small offset of the power amplifier is still too much, you may cre- ate distortion in the transformer and get less than optimal performance from it. Generally this is not the case with transformer-coupled loud- speakers, but it does occasionally surface. In these cases, take special care that the source does not contain a differential DC component, and confirm the differential DC offset of the pre-amplifier is sufficiently low. This differential voltage is easily adjusted by a qualified technician armed with the appropriate service documents.

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 flex- ibility 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.

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