First, I must thank Paul and his entire crew for designing , building and supporting a eally great line of products. Okay, perhaps I am a little biased, as this is the third PS piece I now own.
I initially made this purchase for the front end of my system, the pre, DSD DAC and Memory Player along with my Internet tuner, a Magnum Dynalab MD 809t. Had pondered between the 12 & 15 for the entire system, but the weight consideration won out. I am not a spring chicken anymore and just getting the amps upstairs to the music room required calling some favors. I figured down the line I would figure out which way I was going to go for the amps (Pass 260.8 monoblocks). Discussions with Ken from Pass tried to discourage me from using any kind of condition in front of the amps. So be it…for now.
Getting the unit up, unboxed in the car and on my shoulder, was fairly easy all things considered. Requiring just moving my tapedeck to the otherside of the rack to fit it in and a little fooling with cables that were now too long took a few minutes, plugging units in to the 12, a piece of cake, a fast review of the manual (really, who actually reads those anyway) just in case there was something I might miss and blow everything into another zipcode. Fortunately a fast scan did not uncover anything determental.
With everything now plugged in and having a few more open sockets and with the meter barely moving for the front end pieces, I figured what the hell, if I overloaded the 12 it would merely shut down so I connected the amps. Okay, movement of the meters…up to around 750, so good, I have a little headroom just in case. Starting JRiver I began to run through a couple of familiar tracks…wait a minute…what is this??? did somone swap out components when I wan’t looking? where are MY speakers and what am I listening to??
Yes, I read a bunch of reviews and took all with a grain of salt…yeah, right… like opening a door…pulling back a veil… Guess what…it was no BS…it is really like night and day, literally. Everything sounds so much smoother? bass responce picked up but not boomy just there now when maybe it was not so much before. I get it, first impressions and I have no intent of swapping around a bunch of cables to do an A/B with my old Furman conditioner but I know it is a dramatic improvement, speaker upgrades are off the table for some time to come.
I would like comments as to if I am pushing it a little too much with the amps. Initially I was thinking another 12 for them by themselves down the road but now, not so sure. I will be playing for the rest of the week to see if thing change, but I tend to doubt they will.
Oh, and yes I do have one complaint, minor as it may be. I now have three remotes, okay I don’t need one for the player and DSD as they can be controlled from a single remote…but Paul, it would be nice if you could get the 12’s functions on the remote as well, even On/Off/Standby. I do have a Logitech remote and will have to check if all components are in their database so there might be a workaround. Other than that (well, maybe a 2.5m power cable would have been nice) it is all thumbs up.
Again, great job,
SteveA
ARC LS-27
Magnum Dynalab MD 809t
PSA DSD
PSA DS Memory Player
Nakamichi CR-7a Tape Deck
Pass 260.8 Monoblock
Shahinian Acoustics Hawk Ensemble Speakers
