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Pass Labs x250.8 vs tube amps

I have a beautiful system. Lumin X1 > BAT Rex 2 pre > Pass Labs x250.8> Sound Labs M545 (ESL) in a tiny room (9x 11 ft).  This system has the most glorious SQ: smooth, detailed and powerful , along with great bass. I would say this sound equals or betters any ultra high end system. HOWEVER, I have a problem. My system takes 6 hours of music playing to sound this good. I had X250.5 and I had the same issue. Leaving it on idle overnight doesn’t solve the problem. It is 15 W class A, so it generates quite a bit of heat, and yet I have to still play music. Because my room is small, I don’t crank up too much- maybe this is the problem, but the temperature doesn’t complete stabilize for 5-6 hours. The top reaches 107 deg in 2 hours, but the front plate doesn’t reach 107 until the 6 th hr when it starts to sound glorious. I have never had a tube amp and I am wondering if I can reach that thermal equilibrium and the glorious SQ faster with a tube amp? I worried about the heat generation with a tube amp in this small room, but X250.8 generates 450 W just idling. This is no worse than tube amps like Audio Research 150 Se, which I demo’d and was impressed by. BTW, I need power in the amp because of the esl speakers.
What do you all think?

128x128chungjh
chungjh's avatar
chungjh OP
265 posts
 
Ray

One option I was thinking is to take out the expensive tube BAT Rex2 preamp and connect Lumin X1 streamer/dac directly to a high gain tube amp, using the LEEDH volume control on X1. However, I found with my Pass X250.8, which has gain of 26, some albums weren't loud enough at LEEDH max volume. I was thinking that 3 db additional gain would be just enough. Well, MRE220 has 29 db gain and got good reviews. There is a used one on the market (without SBB) at around $10,000. It should have plenty of power to drive my SL speakers.

1.What is the power consumption at idle? My Rex2/x250.8 combined put out 900W of heat at idle.
2. Sibilance and edgy sound bother me a lot. How does MRE220 do on this?
3. How do you like Jubilee vs. MRE220? The person selling MRE220 is also moving to Jubilee.
andrei_nz
192 posts
 
OP.  There is a problem.  I have a 150.8 and it 'only' took an hour to get best performance, from off.  I leave it on standby and get best performance in minutes.  An amp that takes five or six hours to sound best is defective.  
As for tubes: If your Pre is tube based then in my humble opinion that is enough.  
honeyooi
121 posts
 
Hi Chung, 
we have similar small room and if you not get bother with heat then go try tube amp .The heat from power tubes is hotter than pass amp !!! But winter is coming so no worries 😁.
me also use Pass before but 250.5 And their INT.
my experience with tube amp is pretty fast to warm up , at 15 min I can do listening But getting better in 30 min or so.
I try some prima Luna ,Line magnetic & Audio research Then settle with Air Tight .Tube amp also look better in my opinion 👍.
Have great evening 🙏



arcticdeth's avatar
arcticdeth
1,549 posts
 
@chungjh@chungjh 



 McCormack and odyssey

idle is enough for warmup, if you need more than 6-10 hrs for warm up, that’s not good.

some newer caps may need more warm up time.


atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,640 posts
 
The Sound Labs are a different sort of beast. Like most ESLs, they don't work so well with amps that can double power as impedance is halved, since the Electrostatic principle doesn't rely on a driver in a box...

The impedance curve of the speaker varies by about 10:1 from the bass (peaks at 30 ohms) down to about 3 ohms at 20KHz. But the efficiency of the speaker is about the same though that entire range; for this reason most *but not all* solid state amps will tend to sound bright on them. A Brilliance control is provided to help tone this down a bit, as well as jumpers to allow for more bass, since all solid state amps struggle to make power in the bass region. This is why a tube amp of 140 watts can easily keep up with a solid state amp of 600 watts on that speaker!
Tube amps will stabilize much quicker than solid state (in terms of warming up to get where it needs to go to sound right), so with a good tube amp you should be having the system very near its ultimate warm-up in only an hour, and really sounding quite good in only 15-20 minutes.
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