This is a review and detailed measurements of the Emotiva MC-1 13.2 channel home theater AV Processor (AVP). It was purchased new by a member and drop shipped to me. It costs US $999.
I really like the slim look of the unit. Many so called processors are AVRs with their amps taken out and still shipped in large boxes. This rules them out in many situations where you don't want or can manage such tall boxes. This one is slim and light as it should be.
What you give up here is balanced output for normal channels although a pair is provided for subs (good idea):
I can't figure out why the remote uses hard to push membrane switches. It is not like the remote need to be waterproof or anything.
Operationally, the unit works smoothly and well. The one thing I did not like was lack of acceleration in the rotary encoder for volume. It steps up in half dB which is nice but then it takes forever to go from low to high volume.
Emotiva MC-1 Measurements
I started with HDMI as input and selected Pure/Direct modes. They both produced the same performance across all the measurements so excuse me as I use them interchangeably:
I adjusted the volume to get our nominal 2 volt output for unbalanced RCA. Distortion is actually decent at -100 dB but there is a pile of low frequency noise which drags SINAD down to 88 dB, planting MC-1 in the poor category for AV products:
I switched to Toslink and actually disconnected the HDMI cables to make sure its noise is not polluting the output:
As you the elevated low frequency noise is still there but the bit of jitter we had with HDMI is gone.
The good news is that the unit has plenty of headroom on its output:
This means that you can drive plenty of power amplifiers to their maximum wattage. And if they have lower gain than normal, gain some signal to noise ratio:
Multitone was very disappointing:
There is a lot of noise/intermodulation there. But also, roll off at 20 kHz. This can't as the sample rate for this test is 192 kHz. This means the internal DAC should produce 96 kHz of bandwidth which way, way higher than 20 kHz. Let's do a simple frequency response and see what is going on:
I confirmed with the info button that the unit was accepting 192 kHz so there was no conversion on my measurement side. But despite setting Pure/Direct mode, there is internal resampling of sorts that is equivalent to 44 or 48 kHz sample rate. This kind of thing really needs to be advertised to the user when he asks for "info." It should say, "input 192 kHz, output XX kHz." This is something all AV companies are guilty of. Anyway, this is not right. There has to be a way to play 192 kHz content to this unit without conversion.
IMD vs level suffers from same high noise level we saw in the dashboard:
Linearity gets hit with noise penalty as well:
Jitter performance objectively is not good:
Strangely, now Toslink looks worse as opposed to the dashboard where it had the upper hand.
Filter performance is poor both in slow roll off and not enough attenuation out of band:
An ideal filter would follow my vertical line and disappear from bottom of the graph. When it does not, it causes the following measurement to look worse:
This however is a lot worse than expected so let's look at the spectrum up to 90 kHz:
The sloping up is classic "noise shaping" used in some DACs to push audible noise to inaudible spectrum. In this day and age, we don't see it often. Fortunately it is harmless as you are not going to hear it anyway.
Conclusions
The overall form factor and functionality of the unit seems nice but is let down by well below average performance. There are a lot of noise and interference issues creeping into every measurement. And we have that situation with high resolution content being resampled.
BTW, I saw some reference to Emotiva's own room EQ in there. Not sure how good that is. Or what its origins are. If that performs well, that would be a reason to get this unit over some desktop DAC.
I can't recommend the Emotiva MC-1 if you are looking for a well measuring unit. I think they can do better by performing a clean up pass and at least getting rid of that low frequency noise.
I really like the slim look of the unit. Many so called processors are AVRs with their amps taken out and still shipped in large boxes. This rules them out in many situations where you don't want or can manage such tall boxes. This one is slim and light as it should be.
What you give up here is balanced output for normal channels although a pair is provided for subs (good idea):
I can't figure out why the remote uses hard to push membrane switches. It is not like the remote need to be waterproof or anything.
Operationally, the unit works smoothly and well. The one thing I did not like was lack of acceleration in the rotary encoder for volume. It steps up in half dB which is nice but then it takes forever to go from low to high volume.
Emotiva MC-1 Measurements
I started with HDMI as input and selected Pure/Direct modes. They both produced the same performance across all the measurements so excuse me as I use them interchangeably:
I adjusted the volume to get our nominal 2 volt output for unbalanced RCA. Distortion is actually decent at -100 dB but there is a pile of low frequency noise which drags SINAD down to 88 dB, planting MC-1 in the poor category for AV products:
I switched to Toslink and actually disconnected the HDMI cables to make sure its noise is not polluting the output:
As you the elevated low frequency noise is still there but the bit of jitter we had with HDMI is gone.
The good news is that the unit has plenty of headroom on its output:
This means that you can drive plenty of power amplifiers to their maximum wattage. And if they have lower gain than normal, gain some signal to noise ratio:
Multitone was very disappointing:
There is a lot of noise/intermodulation there. But also, roll off at 20 kHz. This can't as the sample rate for this test is 192 kHz. This means the internal DAC should produce 96 kHz of bandwidth which way, way higher than 20 kHz. Let's do a simple frequency response and see what is going on:
I confirmed with the info button that the unit was accepting 192 kHz so there was no conversion on my measurement side. But despite setting Pure/Direct mode, there is internal resampling of sorts that is equivalent to 44 or 48 kHz sample rate. This kind of thing really needs to be advertised to the user when he asks for "info." It should say, "input 192 kHz, output XX kHz." This is something all AV companies are guilty of. Anyway, this is not right. There has to be a way to play 192 kHz content to this unit without conversion.
IMD vs level suffers from same high noise level we saw in the dashboard:
Linearity gets hit with noise penalty as well:
Jitter performance objectively is not good:
Strangely, now Toslink looks worse as opposed to the dashboard where it had the upper hand.
Filter performance is poor both in slow roll off and not enough attenuation out of band:
An ideal filter would follow my vertical line and disappear from bottom of the graph. When it does not, it causes the following measurement to look worse:
This however is a lot worse than expected so let's look at the spectrum up to 90 kHz:
The sloping up is classic "noise shaping" used in some DACs to push audible noise to inaudible spectrum. In this day and age, we don't see it often. Fortunately it is harmless as you are not going to hear it anyway.
Conclusions
The overall form factor and functionality of the unit seems nice but is let down by well below average performance. There are a lot of noise and interference issues creeping into every measurement. And we have that situation with high resolution content being resampled.
BTW, I saw some reference to Emotiva's own room EQ in there. Not sure how good that is. Or what its origins are. If that performs well, that would be a reason to get this unit over some desktop DAC.
I can't recommend the Emotiva MC-1 if you are looking for a well measuring unit. I think they can do better by performing a clean up pass and at least getting rid of that low frequency noise.
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