Pass Laboratories XP-22 LINE PREAMPLIFIER
For those who listen with their ears and not their brain, perfectionist hi-fi offers many surprises.
A friend called me up a few weeks ago and asked if the DAC we both own had received an automatic firmware update he hadn’t heard about; something had changed, it wasn’t good, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. His system’s sound was suddenly pale and unfocused.
There had been no firmware update.
The next morning, he called me again. He’d remembered that, earlier the day before, he’d swapped out a meter or so of the standard Ethernet cable connecting his network switch to his DAC with an expensive, audiophile one.
This is not a review of an Ethernet cable or my friend’s ears or the science of subtle cognitive bias. It’s a review of Pass Laboratories’ XP-22 solid-state preamplifier ($9500). The relevance of this cable story—to which I’ll return in a moment—is this: Lately, I’ve reviewed a lot of preamplifiers, and I’ve often found them to improve the sound of the system I’ve heard them in. Other reviewers have found the same thing. From a scientific perspective, this doesn’t make sense. Adding a preamplifier—yet another active component, hence more noise and distortion—should not improve the sound of an audio system, but degrade it. Any improvement seems almost as unlikely as a network cable dramatically altering a system’s sound.
By the time my friend figured out what was going on—or what he thinks was going on—his system was sounding “glorious,” he said: better than ever. If his ears and brain are to be trusted, not only did that network cable dramatically change his system’s sound, it also “broke in” over those first few hours of use.
The scientist in me finds this for a big change. But that’s what he heard. I know—crazy, right?
