4
X5 Owner’s Manual
single blue LED lit. No speaker connected yet. You can go ahead
and connect the source and speakers.
The amplifier can be driven single-end or balanced, if driving the
amplifier single-ended leave the supplied jumpers in place (between
pins 1 & 3 on the XLR).
Now that the source component is connected, make sure there is no
signal coming from it, probably by turning the volume all the way
down.
With the speakers connected, push the front panel button to activate
the amplifier. The “Power” LED will come on. You are ready to play
music.
Do everybody a favor and try not to have shorted output cables. It
happens accidentally all the time, and the amplifier is designed to
survive, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Of course it’s always possible that something could go wrong. If so,
don’t get excited, just relax. It’s really aggravating when something
like this doesn’t work, we understand, but it will get fixed. We go to
a lot of trouble to make products reliable, and the failure rate of our
amplifiers is almost non-existent. This is small comfort to the few,
but take it easy and give us a call if you have problems.
People are interested in how long it takes for these amplifiers to
break in. It takes about an hour for them to warm up, and this is
where we adjust them first. Then we adjust them again and again
over a couple of days, keeping the bias and offset in the sweet spot.
Our environment is about 23 degrees Centigrade, room temperature,
and the heat sinks will rise to about 22 degrees C. above that, for a
heat sink temperature of 45 degrees C.
In your setup the temperature may vary a bit due to line voltage and
ventilation, but it is not a big deal. You should be able to put your
hands on the heat sinks without discomfort.
The amplifier has a thermal cutout that will disconnect AC power if
the temperature exceeds 75 degrees Centigrade. This should never
occur in real life.
More things to know: You can remotely operate the stand-by mode
by applying 12 volts DC to the single pair of 5 way connectors on
the rear of the amplifier. The positive of the 12 volts DC goes to
the red connector. This connection has an actual operating range
