Pass Labs X5 owner manual Speaker Interface

Speaker Interface

Interconnects and Speaker Cables

X5 Owner’s Manual

of about 9 volts to 15 volts. This switching will override the front panel button, so if you want the button to operate, leave the rear connection open.

So much for essential information.

The X5 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 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 circuit was designed to be quite happy driving electrostatic and other speakers, since it is unconditionally stable.

When driving transformer-coupled loads directly, as in some electrostatic 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 create distortion in the transformer and get less than optimal performance from it. Generally this is not the case with transformer coupled loudspeakers, 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 amplifier is sufficiently low. This is easily adjusted by a qualified technician armed with the service manual. Again, consult your dealer or call us.

We have a general recommendation about interconnects, which is that they should cost less than the amplifier. 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. It is also not sensitive to radio frequency pickup, which allows some flexibility in choosing source interconnects without shields.

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 send me a couple hundred feet.

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