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.

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!

No density apologies called for, I should have explained (if I didn't). Following Nelson Pass's advice, I'm paralleling both inputs, through Y-adapters for my interconnect cables, and outputs, by bundles of wire between L/R binding posts. I'm told that I MAY get some advantage, with reactive loads, in regard to transient responds, by using both channels of the Aleph 3's, and since I can't turn one of them off, that's what I'm doing. The benefits of short speaker cables--and they are huge, IMHO--can still be had by leaving one channel on each Aleph 3 empty, and maybe it would sound just as good, who knows? (Maybe Nelson Pass would, and he did recommend the parallel wiring using both channels.)