What makes you thing the Coda S20 will sound weak? The Dragons aren’t cutting it, but they don’t sound weak. My only problem with Pass is the size and weight. What can you tell me about the sonic qualities of the Parasound?
I based that comment on how weak the Coda No.8 and No.11 both sounded in my system compared to my Parasound A21. That was with them driving my Magnepan 0.7s. The A21 sounded the best with the Maggies by a fairly wide margin. I can’t imagine the additional 50 WPC of the Coda S20 would make a significant difference over the 150 WPC of the Coda 8. Parasound is not quite as resolving, but paired with a very transparent preamp like a Benchmark LA4, it’s transparent enough. I did some free and easy mods to my A21 which seemed to improve that aspect some: dampened the filter caps, improved the xformer shield drain, and tightened all the binding posts from inside the chassis.
The A21 has a tonal profile that’s similar to the Hegel H190 I owned for a time, but the Parasound has more depth, drive, headroom and instrument separation. Both are on the warm side of neutral (probably too warm for most tube preamps). Paired my current speakers, Satori Helios Textremes, the A21 provides all the resolution I could ever want. It is the best amp/speaker combo I’ve assembled in the past 20 years, among dozens. The A21 has a distortion profile that’s second-order dominant which I suspect is why it’s so non fatiguing. As you may know, most SS amps are third-order dominant.
The Pass sound falls somewhat between Parasound and Coda IME. I really enjoyed my time with the Pass XA25 (purportedly their best sounding model) but it was a joke compared to the A21 in driving the Maggies. If I were to ever get the itch to replace the A21, I would probably go for a Pass 250 or 350.
Hope that helps.