Aleph Owners and Users...

I have an Aleph 4 (100w/ch in one large box) and love it. Its the truest sounding amp I've owned so far. MGottlieb is right, though, they really use a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. Its no surprise, they run "pure class A", no switching power supplies or other gimmicks to achieve "sort of class A". Thats why they sound so good. They are essentially a 2 stage triode design with lots of output transistors in parallel to get 100w (in the case of the Aleph 4). I just bought a small whisper fan and all is well.

I owned the 3 and then got the 2s. Surprisingly the 2s are not that much more powerful than the 3. The bass was fuller, and I could play a bit louder. As far as improvments that's about it. I think that the 3 may edge out the 2s in transparency, the 2s sound a little dark to me compared to the 3. If you can live with 30 watts, then the Aleph 3 has got to be one of the best buys in high end.

I own Aleph 3's and have been told that Aleph 5's are essentially the same design with more power, and the further plus of accepting XLR connectors. What I can contribute here is mainly a question: do the Alephs other than 3 and 5 have only two gain stages? If not, some difference in quality of sound should be expected, maybe better for some aspects, worse for others. I guess the Pass Labs Website no longer discusses the Alephs. Too bad.

A further remark: I'm using two Alpeh 3's as monoblocks, with 8' interconnects and 18" speaker cables, and have made direct comparisons with a single Aleph 3, 1M interconnects and 7' speaker cables, and the benefits of going to monoblocks are tremendous! I'll never use anything but monoblocks and short speaker cables ever again. The improvement that monoblocks (with the short speaker cables they permit) bring is likely to be far greater than the improvement gained by moving from one model to another, IMHO.

So Tom, when you say you are using the 3's a monoblocks, does that mean you are doing a vertical bi-amp arrangement, splitting the input into two channels and driving the bass with one and the mid/tweet with the other channel?