Aegir upgrade to Pass...maybe

I'm always kind of puzzled at these kinds of comparisons.  Comparing amps that differ so wildly in price is really useless, for the most part. 

A person with $800 to spend will not find anything better than the Aegir, sound quality wise(probably even up to $2000), although pairing to a difficult load may be its achilles heel.(Their other products perform the same, double the price to find their equal in the retail marketplace)

Someone who has 7 times that budget, or $4900(which appears to be the Pass XA25 retail) will get compromised results by stooping to the Aegir, and typically people with that kind of money do not accept a neutered result. 

So there would be no surprises to compare the two amps side by side.  OF COURSE the Pass will supersede the Aegir.  We don't need a comparison to tell us that.

The attraction to the Aegir is how much over the top bang for buck you get for 799.  I've only got the Vidar, and I'm seriously impressed with how easily it bests my other amps. The Aegir is even better than that, and it was Schiit Audio's first amp product to make Stereophile's recommended list, and mediocre products do not make the list.

But if you've got the budget, Pass Labs is in another league.  Nobody wants to play in the minor leagues if they don't have to.  Well, almost nobody.

Thanks for your response.  When I referred to clearance, my wording got a little clumsy.  I meant the clearance or space around each RCA jack.  I’m thinking your cables have really big rca connectors, but I don’t understand the problem, I guess.

When you say you were “unable to install” the left jack, what was it that prevented it from being inserted in/onto the amp rca jack?

Not one, but 2 Aegir amps, eh?  Not one, but 3 different RCA cables, huh?  That story has many missing details which is too bad, it would have been helpful to have simple measurements of the clearance and the left and right RCA inputs, for example.  Or how the one amp got hot when it couldn't accept a signal from the RCA inputs.

Failures in quality control do happen, and every brand has such issues.  I will say that I've owned over 15 Schiit components, and I've only had one minor issue with one.  I currently have 9 and every one performs as designed.