Aleph Owners and Users...

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?

Tom: To my knowledge, the Aleph 3,5, 4, 2, and 1.2 all use 2 gain stages. The 0 and 0s used three.

Drubin, I don't have the option of biamping or biwiring with my Quad ESL 63's. But for anyone who does, I'd certainly give it a try, though I'd ask Nelson Pass about it first. I don't think there's any risk to amps or speakers, but there still may be wisdom to be gained as to how well various arrangements work. I'm simply connecting both inputs and outputs in parallel. The biggest benefit, I think, comes with the short speaker cables that monoblocks permit. But once you have that, why not try for even more? Nelson Pass is good about responding to emails, in my experience. Look at www.passlabs.com to get their email address. Good luck!