Doubt that. Sure many, many were (are) happy with their XMC-2s. My only complaint is the VRO audio issue. I can live with the slow HDMI switching. Expect that both are fixed with the CR8 upgrade.
Russ
Would you mind telling me why someone WOULD be particularly happy with the retail XMC-2 purchase, assuming that person actually values both sound quality and overall product value? As opposed to only caring about the fact that it has basic AVR functionality, is 16 channel, has balanced outs, decent build quality and ultimately processes a digital signal into a sound resembling the audio signal that it's supposed to. Well, it does do that except that it has poor signal to noise plus excessive distortion and a very high noise floor when tested that's not even seen in similar/cheaper AVR products (most of them in fact produce a much cleaner sound than the Emotiva does and cost significantly less, probably even using much cheaper DACs and DAC setups and nothing is balanced. I truly don't think "balanced" really makes much of an audible difference (unless we are talking long distances,) but if someone can prove me wrong one day by showing me in person the differences in the sound, I have an open mind. I'm not against using balanced or anything. I think it's pretty cool to use the big ass quality cables, and it's fun, which is part of the reason I went for the balanced Emotiva.
My dad, who is a real electrical engineer that knows his stuff says that the whole balanced thing is basically a scam to make money more than it is something that actually makes a difference in sound quality. I tend to agree, but I still like it.
What I'm saying is, if someone is aware that they can get a very similar product without distortion, without a horrible signal to noise ratio and an extremely high noise floor (among other issues like HDMI and the menus are really slow,) Hell, I had "loading fonts" along with a progress bar that just kept repeating itself on my screen for years after installing a firmware update and the thing has to be restarted manually multiple times a day using the power button on the remote or if that doesn't work then the switch on the back of the device itself has to be toggled. It will freeze up at least once a day, prior to the latest update anyway. If they're aware of all this, why would they pay so much more money for an inferior product?
Unless the purchaser was simply ignorant to the fact that the XMC-2 has a ton of bugs, more noise (and thus worse sound quality,) than most or even ALL of the cheapest comparable products... then why would they ever be happy with having purchased it for so much money when they could've purchased a MUCH better sounding product for a lot less money? It's of much lower (sound) quality than not only what buyers should have expected based on Emotiva's advertising and the XMC-2's inflated price... but is actually much worse than that because it has a much lower quality of sound than virtually 99%+ of AVR bargain bin products. I remember the testers saying on multiple occasions testing the XMC-2 and RMC1 that they had never tested a DAC that had such horrible SNR characteristics and other issues. And for me, the fact that it is of such a low quality when producing sound that's ultimately so dirty/noisy and at such a base level (the entire device has the issue and there's no fixing it,) pretty much has the effect of rendering moot every single other advantage one might have assumed that the product would've had over cheaper alternative products when they bought it... such as the balanced in/out ports and the high quality balanced DAC array or whatever it's called, ...and the seemingly solid build quality. As far as I can tell the XMC-2 doesn't actually do anything of significant value when you consider that you've got a starting point of a device that has an extremely bad signal to noise ratio, an abnormally high noise floor and additional distortion. Really, who cares about balanced inputs and high quality balanced DAC setups when you've got a horrible signal to noise ratio to deal with at the most basic level anyways ...and then distortion on top of that. It's the same thing with Dirac Live... who cares about Dirac when you've got issues at the most base level when it comes to reproducing the sound. No matter what you do with Dirac or anything else you will never be able to fix this most basic but serious issue of excessive noise.
I hear that Emotiva doesn't even give out a rated SNR ratio for their products. Clearly they are aware of these serious sound quality issues and simply have chosen to hide or sort of sweep under the rug these issues. They're pretending they don't exist because it's much cheaper and easier than either scrapping the whole thing or paying a ton of money to debug the product meticulously and then pay to fix/reproduce the hardware. Since they aren't testing for these issues in any sort of way that actually directs how the build of the final product is conceived, nor are they providing a rated SNR ratio for the product, then they can "claim" they don't know anything is wrong with the sound quality or the product in general.
The fact that they'd rather sweep it under the rug rather than to actually create the great product they'd been promising to their loyal customers who are lining up to pay outlandish amounts of money for audio products that already have extremely high diminishing returns the higher up you go in price to begin with, to me, is the biggest deal breaker. It's like purchasing an AMG Mercedes with a brand new, shiny hand-built engine ...and then to your surprise, you find out that it actually runs much slower/less efficient/etc than the engine that was slapped into your neighbors Neo Geo at the factory and en masse or something. Why pay all that money for an inferior product?
At least to me, that attitude says everything I need to know about a supposed "high quality/audiophile" audio brand. When they don't even test for (or at least provide,) a SNR that people can use to gauge and compare the product then how can we think they will ever produce a quality product? On the other hand, and if you're not aware of these issues, they claim they are all about doing every possible little thing they can, in spite of costs, to produce the cleanest and best sounding processor/audio product that they possibly can. I'm sure they didn't fix it (again, at least in part) because they'd've probably had to scrap the entire product.
In a recent video from Emotiva that I happened to watch, they said they found out that they actually knew "nothing" about HDMI when they were building the first XMC-2 (which as everyone knows has or had massive issues with the HDMI.) Anyway, they said the guy they brought in to help them debug and fix the firmware and HDMI issues told them that they had to rewrite and redo everything from scratch (the HDMI board stuff, anyway) if they wanted it to work properly without massive latency and/or other issues because basically it was fundamentally flawed in its design. My guess is that it's a similar thing with the SNR issue, the high noise floor and the distortion. It's not something they can fix without starting from close to scratch. Correct me if I'm wrong on that because I am just guessing. Maybe they could meticulously debug the product (it certainly wouldn't be cheap though,) and I guess follow the entire signal path very closely in order to figure out what is causing the noise issues ....without actually having to redo every single piece of hardware. They're a small company and it's not only impractical for them to redo a product they thought was finished but it would likely bankrupt them I'm guessing if they truly had to scrap the product and redo it.
