MC402 vs FPB 300cx

Jc51373, the Pass X250.5 was an excellent addition to my system. It is truly a world class amp. Resolving, dynamic and smooth. Really can't find any faults or anything I would like to improve on as far as amplification.

I am pretty surprised that you have to do some kind of mods to this amp to make it work with your preamp. Hmmmm

I think that the sibilance could be in part due to your interconnects and speaker cables. Do you experience this sibilance on all the recordings or just some?

Thanks Aball...Some good points you made. I am going to lift the hood on the amp today and remove the jumpers (per instructions from Krell) on the input stage of the amp itself.VTL is capacitively coupled on the output, so it is now double CC'd.

I will be impressed if it changes anything, expectations are low. Based on some of the points you made though and the fact my KAV was coupled on the input stage it makes sense to eliminate this as a possible solution to the glare.

The MC402 I had did this exact same thing, glared.

If you are hearing glare from two nice and very different amps, then the problem may not be the amplifiers at all. I think I would start looking for problems elsewhere in the chain...

Arthur

Good point, but it only happened/happened when they were inserted into the system.

Yeah but that doesn't necessarily mean the problem is the amps themselves - just that the amps revealed the problem to you. I have seen this before and in that case, it turned out to be the CD player that was the culprit but he couldn't tell it was the issue until he had upgraded his amps. It took him a long time to figure it out because he was convinced it was the amps doing it at first.

The system is only as good as the weakest link, unfortunately. When you upgrade something, you hear what you have upstream all the more. This is the tricky part about transparency.

Arthur