Experience with the Pass Labs XP-15 phono stage?

I also give it the highest recommendation. And I also got mine from Mark at Reno HiFi. It was a superb transaction.

The XP-15 was a tremendous upgrade from my Xono. Tone and timbre both improved quite significantly. I couldn't be more pleased.

Kennyb, I completely agree about tone and timbre. I always felt the earlier Pass stuff was to the cooler side of neutral having owned an X1 pre and moving to an XP10. I have heard the Xono and agree about the increase in sound quality with the XP15. Lanetim--hope everything works out well. The directions by Wayne Colburne that come with the XP15 for setting gain and loading are really quite helpful. I tried a few settings but pretty quickly settled on where I am now. Can you tell us more about your setup, esp the preamp--what gain does that offer now? Have you decided on the dyna xx2? Keep us posted. Swanny

PS, A friend of mine was over the other day and had never heard my setup before (and probably nothing approaching high end before either). We ended up listening to a bunch of vinyl for a couple hours while our wonderful wives tended to a play date with our daughters. He was really blown away and so was I with record after record. It's a very revealing stage but also one that performs so well and so naturally that no matter the type of music it all is well presented in a very musical and non fatiguing fashion. It just gets out of the way and lets you hear deeply into the recording. That is, if everything is set up properly up the chain--tonearm, cart, clean records, etc.

I've been pretty much an ARC guy for some time. My current preamp is a Reference 5, and my power amp is a Reference 150. Turntable is a VPI Scoutmaster with a Classic 3 arm w/ the Classic platter etc.

I've decided to spend my upgrade budget this year on bringing my Ref 5 up to SE level...been on the upgrade waiting list for nearly a year. Time to try calling Kalvin at ARC again... Going to the Ref 5 made the biggest difference in my system by a big measure. It is a phenomenal preamp.

I have an XP-15/Lyra Delos/VPI Classic and really enjoy the rig. I don't have any ARC experience, but this combo plays nice together. Run balanced out to an XP-20, very very quiet.