What are the weak points of Pass amps and pre-amps ?

High efficiency or perhaps more correctly high sensitivity unto itself is an admirable attribute. High sensitivity can play louder, tends to allow lower amplifier distortion, reduce power requirements and ergo reduce cost,size, weight and heat. High sensitivity also allows more noise into the signal. On the other hand it’s easer to create a steady lower impedance than higher one. A steady impedance is easier on amplifiers, reduces the potential for phase angle challenges, and frequency response linearity deviations. There are many considerations that go into speaker design, balancing them all sometimes requires sacrificing the ultimate capabilities of some attributes in order to better accommodate other considerations. How many commercially available high efficiency loudspeakers capable of time and phase coherence can you name? How many high efficiency speakers can demonstrate a good step response or square wave?

Never buy anything from a human that is trying to sell you something. They are way too dangerous. Chord? Are you kidding me? The difference between Pass and Curl designs is that they actually care what their amps sound like and they actually know how to listen to them on top of knowing what their customers want. Frankly, if it is art you are looking for buy a Boulder, best low distortion art out there . Oh, and if anybody thinks they have to spend that much money to get incredible sound they are out of their mind!! Besides, it is a lot more fun doing it on a budget.

I've only heard the 30.8 and the Int-60, but they were both outclassed by Perla Audio's Signature 50 integrated with Sopra 2's.  All of them leaned toward the warm side of neutral which I like w/ the Sopra's, but you could easily tell the Perla Audio integrated had superior clarity and image specificity without sacrificing density and that relaxed liquid sound that the .8 series has.  The Perla amp also uses only 5w in standby mode and never even gets warm, let alone Class A type of hot.

I also preferred an AVM integrated (not sure the model, roughly $10k range) to the comparative Pass offerings as well.

Never owned the  X or XA series amps or preamps, but have always felt the earlier Aleph series were somewhat overrated, having owned the Aleph 2/5 amps, P preamp, and Ono/X-Ono phonostages.  The Ono/X-Ono, in particular, were so mediocre sounding compared to, say, a Jeff Rowland Cadence

We all hear differently. The Pass Preamplifiers and phonos are very neutral and what ever you have upstream, you will hear be it good or not so good. the thing is I do not want my Preamplifiers to sound like anything. Lots do unfortunately.  The Jeff Rowland stuff is good but I certainly would not say it blows away the older Pass stuff.  Synergy is the key in this hobby.  The Pass, ,older or newer in the right system can sound fantastic.