Here as well! Bah!
Funny thing is that week NYC was orange I and other in CT had a slight haze but it smelt like neighbors having a bon fire.
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I love the acoustic stone diffusers!
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We currently have a haze in northern IL today and a chemical smell.
No orange haze or smoke here, but a thick blue hazy smoke in the trees and water surface. The smell is akin to tar paper smoldering. The Fire map shows the intensity here to be incredibly high with a PM2.5 AQI of 190 ugm/M3 (micro-grams per meter cubed), that’s with wind gusts up to 20 mph.
As Al said, bah!
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Badges and rave reviews make me feel worthy
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Very nice clean system. Visual and audio work of art I’m sure.
I absolutely love my Pass XP-12 preamp. No need for tubes in the big system anymore (IMHO).
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I’ve been tube-free for over a year now, and don’t miss it at all. And so far, I am loving the XP-20. Impressive piece of kit!
I originally wanted to get a new XP-12, but other things came up and put it out of reach for me. Then this wonderful, basically mint XP-20 showed up here on the forums, and it was within reach (obviously). 
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A fine piece indeed.
Always wanted to hear the two preamps side by side. My initial thought being the volume control and power supply upgrade offered in the XP-12 may offer preferred sonics compared to the XP-20.
Since @Chops is now happily using my XP-20, I’ll give you my own view regarding the change from the ‘20 to the ‘22. Point #1, is the XP-22 better than the XP-20? Yeeess… but, Point #2 - the XP-20 is not in the least put to shame by the newer preamp. My honest feeling is that it might be hard to justify the cost (a completely personal decision of course) between a nice used ‘20 and a brand new ‘22, dependent to some degree on whether the money might be better spent on other parts of a system first. In my case I’m quite pleased indeed having done so; it was my plan to move to the ‘22 and for it to be my last preamp change for the foreseeable future. Pass stuff is so good that the usual, highly exaggerated “this new model makes the old one sound like trash” yelling from the rooftops just doesn’t really apply.
I can’t speak to a comparison between an XP-20 and an XP-12, but I have heard a ‘12 and a ‘22 in the same system. As no surprise the ‘22 was better, so given how pleased I was with the ‘20 it made me wonder if the switch from a ‘20 to a ‘12 would be worth it. Regardless of the vintage, the separate power supply does seem to bring a decided improvement to the sound.
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Discerning comments…
Regards.
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Hey Tony thanks for the comparison. Had the XP-20 fit into my current rack the decision to pursue either two box XP’s would have been a simple matter. No rush at this point as my short term priority is to thin the herd. I have accumulated a considerable amount of equipment that needs to find a new home.
Yeah, it seems we all go through that to some degree or another. 
I still have a few things left that will need a good home. But I made a conscious effort about 5 years ago to spend the following years finally getting what would be (for me) the best system my means would allow - knowing that I’d soon be going into retirement. I figured “use the resources if they’re available “, and they were. So that’s what I’ve done, a bit at a time or when (as in the case of the DS MkII) the advance presented itself as I suspected it would. All that’s left is a streamer - probably the trickiest of all as it seems we’ve entered the period of them popping out of the woodwork. But I’m looking at the Lumin U2, the upcoming Rose 130, something in that price range that will make me happy. Once that’s done, I’ll be in a position where advancing my system even a little bit will probably cost me a lot more money. 
But in a way I already know I’ve gotten there, as I’ve found finally I care virtually nothing about “what’s making” the music I’m listening to. 
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The performers and writers make the music, the boxes give us ready access, if we are lucky our system will reveal - more or less - the beauty of their work and move us even if a facsimile of their gift
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Buying yet another preamp when I have four collecting dust, well that’s just insane. So they need to go, at least one for now. I finally finished up eliminating my speaker backlog, 6 pairs sitting unused or on loan, 4 amplifiers in a similar situation, and 2 Decware SET amplifiers, so slowly I’m getting there. I have three forever systems for now, well maybe four. 
A Pass Labs XP_2 has been part of the plan.
The Decware experiment was a bit of a distraction, but I’m back on track.
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In comparison to you, then, I’m a piker! 
Acquiring has always been easier than separation and ultimate departure. 
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Before I purchased “your” XP-20, I was reading in a bunch of various forums about this preamp, and remember reading in one of them where someone did a side-by-side comparison of their '20 to the new '12 out of curiosity, and in their system, the '20 still out-performed the '12 by a fair margin.
Of course, this was only one man’s opinion, but he had a pretty stout system to back it up including a pair of Pass monoblocks, a Lumin streamer, Halo DAC, and a big pair of Estelon speakers in a well treated room.
I figured if he came to that conclusion with his system, then it was a no-brainer for me to upgrade to the '20 from my Quad preamp.
Very true. Mainly because I hate packing things up and shipping them off. LOL
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