Pass Labs writes: “At Pass Labs, we don’t change our products unless we feel that the changes are significant improvements over previous versions. Because of this we see typical product life spans of seven to eight years.
We are constantly working on and listening to new things and increasing our knowledge of circuits and components on sound. Eventually we find some things worth putting into production because they are significant enough. That time has come with a new series of preamplifiers.”
The XP-12: Single Chassis Line Level Preamp
The new XP-12 starts with a new power supply. It uses an efficient toroidal design with both an electrostatic and Mu metal shield, along with vacuum impregnating and epoxy fill. This gives us a very quiet transformer both electrically and mechanically.
The power supply circuitry itself is also lower noise and has additional filtering; perhaps a little more complicated, but worth it.
The XP-12 uses the single stage volume control borrowed from the Xs line preamp. This gives us one hundred 1 dB steps with lower noise and distortion, while removing some signal path parts.
The gain circuitry continues to use our favorite transistors from Toshiba, but has a larger, higher biased output stage like the Xs preamplifier’s auto bias. This makes longer and multiple cable runs easier to drive and provides the advantage of simplifying our single-ended output circuitry while increasing performance.
Overall this makes for a quieter, more neutral, musical and versatile control center for your system.
XP-12 Specs:
Power consumption 50 Watts
Gain 9.3dB Balanced
Frequency response: +/- 0.05 dB 10Hz to 20KHz
-1dB @ 100KHz
Crosstalk > 100dB
Residual Noise 15uV 10 – 30Khz
THD < 0.001 @ 1V 1Khz
Double shielded low noise toroid
Dimensions: 17” W x 12.5” D x 4” H
MSRP: $5,800