Pass Labs XA- ".5" ???

Tbooe, you can't be serious that you haven't seen the meter move on Pass amps. On your XA amp, that series the meter should never move. But on the X series, the meter moves on my 250.5 when I play above anything approaching high medium volume levels. So, I cannot believe your claim that you have listened to other Pass amps at very loud volume and never seen the meter move. What, with 100db horns?

Driving VSA jr's, said to be 88 db, the meter would swing to 2 or 3 pm on quite loud levels of big band jazz. And it would regularly swing to 1 pm at "regular" loud levels.

Pass Labs told me the amp could handle much more than what I described, without distorting and the amp would be just fine.