I've enjoyed mine. I would think that perhaps aside from the slight channel imbalance, the measured shortfalls would fall well below audibility and the end result would be "transparent enough" for most. Of course, I'd rather have a Benchmark AHB2.
- There were times I wanted some more power when driving inefficient bookshelves.
- They were quite a treat with the fairly efficient (~91dB) Overnight Sensation MTM or S2000 MTM DIY kits. Either of those pairings can really rattle a room and do it pretty cleanly. That is a lot of very decent sound for < $500 and a weekend of elbow grease.
- The standby/auto-on feature works quite well. It uses something like 0.5W in standby and turns on nearly instantly once an audio signal is detected.
I own the older version sans headphone jack. AFAIK there's no difference between the two besides the jack.
While I enjoy my slightly dodgy chip amps... the Emotiva also never makes me wonder if it's going to burn my house down, so that's worth something.
There is a fan on top but I did not hear it come on. The unit does get quite warm though so allow ample cooling/space above it.
When this was my every day amp, I never felt the amp was much more than perhaps ~20F above room temp. Of course, it was a small room, so I'm sure I wasn't pushing it as hard. But there were times I did push it rather hard and didn't feel much heat...
Last I checked, nobody has ever heard the fan activate on one of these units. I'm sure somebody can dig up a counterexample, but when I was shopping for amps and obsessively reading reviews everybody who tested this thing mentioned never being able to make the fan activate since the unit stayed quite cool. My impression is that the fan was sort of a failsafe in case people crammed this thing into a rack with near-zero ventilation.
So we have yet another example of our fearless leader pushing things harder than most.
If you have a passive sub with hi-pass sat speaker outs (rare these days), quite simply to the speaker outputs of the amp, and the sat speakers to the sub's sat outs. An active sub can be connected (depending on its design) with either a Y-cable or L+R RCA to the RCA output. Having an active sub and passive sat speakers, you will get some delay on the sub side. That said, I wouldn't be getting this one
Are you saying folks could connect their active sub to the RCA outputs on the A-100?
If so, that's not quite correct for most people. Those RCA outputs are fixed volume.
Of course, it can work if you're willing to do volume control upstream, but probably not what most people would be looking for.