The older I get, the more I value my comfort. Used to be I’d go camping without a tent and just stand for a long weekend. Beer and psychedelics kept me upright. But I was in my early 20s, and I had the stamina to power through lack of sleep and survive on baloney sandwiches.
These days, the mere thought of that kind of suffering makes me wince. Most nights, I’m in bed by 9:00, and I need my sheets changed weekly. Don’t get me started on my soft-towel requirements.
As the years pass, I find myself attracted to systems that allow me to relax into the music. While I still appreciate pinpoint imaging and crisp, detailed highs, I also find myself drawn to systems that, in decades past, I’d write off as too plump, too homogeneous.
So I walked into the Pass Labs room, which featured two of their First Watt SIT‑5 mono amplifiers ($11,000 each, all prices in USD) driving a pair of Rogers PM510 S3 speakers ($29,900/pair), and found myself immediately comfortable, relaxing into music that just washed over me, without stress or edge.
That’s not to say the system presented music without detail or clarity. No sir. But there was no artifice here. Like when you attend a concert and sit mid-way back from the stage. The music reaches out as a physical force, without the artificial imaging that many (most) systems project. Real music is a wall of sound, and the stereo imaging we’ve come to expect is a way of replacing the missing impact of live music. It’s a consensual hallucination.
These Rogers speakers, powered by the First Watt amps, leaned more toward that wall-of-sound presentation. They didn’t fuck around with such things as prissy little images or artificial instrument depth. Instead, they slammed out a brick wall of music, redolent with musical intent that I could practically taste.
The rack in this room deserves mention in a way that most racks do not. At $32,500, it’s frighteningly expensive, but my stars, is it cool. The shelves are made from Panzerholz, and the stand is entirely custom-made by Precision Composite Industries, a company specializing in professional motorsports.
The Wi‑Fi network at the Sheraton Tampa Brandon was severely overloaded, so Jason Motomoya of Pass Labs, who was operating the controls, couldn’t stream from external services. Instead, they were running off a hard drive with limited albums, so I had to actually browse through someone else’s music! Imagine that! Fortunately, there was some fun stuff there, and I listened through several of my choices and a bunch more that Motomoya (who fortunately has good taste) cued up.
The highlight was Red Hot Chili Peppers covering Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground,” which launched with authority. Loud, Motomoya was playing it loud, and it was fun and entirely stress-free.
I think there were a few things going on here that contributed to this juicy, enveloping presentation. First off, the First Watt amps running in class A kept the signal pure and edge-free. Combine that with the incredibly open-sounding Rogers speakers, which don’t even try to follow that narrow-baffle, detail-above-all sense of hi‑fi gimcrackery. This duo presented an organic sound, one that drew me in and immersed me. I also cast side-eye at the Immersiv D‑1 DAC ($12,000), which I’ve never heard, but seems to have an excellent reputation. Combine that DAC with the Pass Labs XP‑12 preamplifier ($6710) and you’ve got a core system that worked extremely well with the Rogers speakers. It was delightful.
It was steamy in that room. Each of those First Watt amps cranks out 35W in class A, and they run hot. But it was a dry heat, and it felt appropriate, a warm-sounding system in a warm room. Outstanding.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
