The casework is gorgeous, with a tall, polished-stainless face-plate sporting a huge, circular VU meter illuminated by a blue glow, underneath those is an on/off button. They’d saved me from injuring myself, or so I thought… Still, discretion is the better part of valor, and all that. Standing clear and watching their faces as they wrangled these amps was a little hard on my ego, I have to admit. There they sat for a while, mocking me, until I talked a pair of home handymen (helping with a remodeling project) into moving them into the listening room. Grudgingly, he carried them about 3 feet and plopped them down in the hallway. The heavily muscled Fed Ex man sighed loudly and gave me an eye-roll when I asked if he would mind hauling the boxes through my front door. First of all, Stanton was right about the double hernia. That feeling came back as I set up the X600.8s. The thought of unleashing so much power was a bit frightening. I remember when I first hoisted the Dan D’Agostino-designed FPB 300 out of the box (with a lot of help) and connected it, I was afraid to push the “on” button.
For many years, my reference amps were either a Krell KSA-150 (150 watts, all Class A) or a Krell FPB 300 (offering 300 WPC, although with a sophisticated A/B switching circuit). I’ve had plenty of high-current, high-watt amps in my home. While many Class A/B amps operate in A for a handful of watts before switching to B, each X600.8 stays in room-heating Class A for the first 50 of its massive 600 watts of output (into eight ohms). Still, the X600.8s are formidable in their own right. They are not, however, the ultimate expression of Pass Labs technology, as there stand the pure Class A Xs300 monos at $85,000 USD a pair. The chiropractor-pleasing X600.8s I received are, at $26,000 USD a pair, the top of the X.8 high-voltage series.
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As a result, Pass has at least five separate lines of amps – with each containing many models – plus an entire second brand, First Watt, for his additional experiments. In the same way that Young, after decades working at his craft, continues to issue albums at a relentless pace, the industry-veteran Pass has a comparable and seemingly bottomless well of creativity. In my mind, I imagine Pass as kind of the Neil Young of high-end audio. I suspect the explanation for the company’s exhaustive catalog is that its founder, legendary designer Nelson Pass, is a man who is constantly tinkering and getting new ideas. Pass, a pioneer in solid-state power, makes a mind-boggling number of amplifiers. If a manufacturer has one product in the middle of its line that’s impressive, what does the flagship sound like? I might not be able to afford it, but I want to hear it nonetheless. I, like many audiophiles, always am curious about the state of the art. My particular fascination tends to be less about dimensions, however, and more about performance.
After all, there is some truth to that – quite a bit, actually. (Careful what might end up in an email thread, guys…) Apparently, my lack of hesitation to go for the big mono amps was the source of some amusement around the Pass office, with the punch line being that reviewers are a rather predictably size-obsessed bunch. I had agreed, and now Pass wanted to know if it should ship the 127-pound X350.8 stereo amp or a pair of the top-of-the-line, 123-pounds-each X600.8 mono blocks. Do you want the hernia or the double hernia? The voice on the phone asking that question was Bryan Stanton, a communications specialist who works with Pass Labs.Ī few weeks prior, we had begun chatting about Pass sending me one of its X-series amps for review.
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