DuringEnjoy the Music.com's very special 25th Anniversary we're asking various high-end audio manufacturers to answer the same ten questions. Their answers may surprise you! This month we're featuring Nelson Pass of Pass Labs. Pass Laboratories was founded in 1991 by Nelson Pass. Operating out of his shop at home, Pass developed prototypes of a single-ended Class A amplifier design. At the same time, he and Mike Burley were constructing an in-house machine shop with three home-built CNC milling machines with which to produce the amplifiers when the design was finished. The first product, the Aleph 0, shipped in 1992. In 1994 Pass Labs released a newer Aleph design which simplified the circuit from three gain stages down to only two stages and used a newly patented power current source to bias the single-ended output stage. Also in 1994 Nelson was joined by Wayne Colburn, who began working on improved version of the preamp and on a new phono stage. The company received two patents this year, one of them the design that became the SuperSymmetric circuit in use today.Click here for the full interview.
