Review and Measurements of Emotiva XMC-1 Gen 2 Pre/Pro

[audimus]

This is discontinued product. I have lots to review. Does it make sense to spend more time on it?

If you have a lot of current AVRs, amps and Processor to reviews, I would say skip this one. If it is yet another desktop DAC to review, then I would say it is worth it for benchmarking of the smaller sample space for the types of issues that exist in these complex units.

Reviews like this create an impact on brand reputation even if it is for a discontinued product reaching a smaller group. So getting to the bottom of this anomaly and its real world impact if any which otherwise may make it a recommendation is the responsible thing to do, in my opinion.

 

[DonH56]

This was a unit I sent in. I just purchased it used and sent it to Amir for testing. My goal was to see how it tested in comparison to the published specs and to see how it compared to other pre/pros such as Marantz and others. I also wanted to compare it to receivers that I could use for an 11.2 channel setup (using external amplification for 3-7 of the channels). The plan was to then trade in this unit for the XMC2 for the $1000 trade in price. Sounds like most of the issues are fixed on the XMC2, but Dirac still has not been released. With the relatively poor showing of receivers and pre/pros, not sure what direction to go. I may still move forward upgrading to the XMC2. It does have PEQ filters to use to tame room modes until Dirac is released.

Your choice/decision may depend upon usage. If HT, or in a system that does both, the XMC-2 may be a good choice and is likely to also exhibit similar performance (so at or near the top of the AVR/AVP heap). Emotiva claims to focus on good sound above all (yeah, but...) They also have a rep for bugs that sometimes take a while to fix, if ever. Flip a coin. Catch is there is little in its price range with the same feature set, and of course the trade-in deal is really good. I had some significant bugs when I got mine, but that was almost a year after it was introduced (waited until Dirac Live was available), then it was solid if a little quirky until the v3 video board mess. And I've been following the RMC-1 saga. This (October 2019) is the month they said the trade-in program would start; we'll see, and if they can deliver. Historically they've been late but they have shipped some XMC-2's. I'd probably wait a month and see what the initial response is and see if they get Dirac Live up and running on it.

I doubt any AVR/AVP is going to do all that well at this point. Hopefully Amir and others will perform solid testing showing their drawbacks and drive some improvements. I can see compromises in a <$1k or even <$2k unit (keep having to reality-check my price ranges), but a "flagship" ought to do better IMO.

 

[folzag]

If you have a lot of current AVRs, amps and Processor to reviews, I would say skip this one. If it is yet another desktop DAC to review, then I would say it is worth it for benchmarking of the smaller sample space for the types of issues that exist in these complex units.

Reviews like this create an impact on brand reputation even if it is for a discontinued product reaching a smaller group. So getting to the bottom of this anomaly and its real world impact if any which otherwise may make it a recommendation is the responsible thing to do, in my opinion.

And it's an interesting technical question. Is it muting (in an effort to work-around/paper-over some other clicking/popping bugs) that does not matter when listening to real music signal? Or does matter, if the muting is unconditionally -90dB.

If it were just another poorly performing DAC or even AVR, sure, who cares... but again, it's the best measured AVR to date. Giving the benefit of a little extra testing seems warranted.

 

[RichB]

It is muting and it takes time to recover. They said it was a digital 0 problem. You'd have to ask Emotiva for details. I'm an analog guy...

I don't know either, I'm a software guy.
I am taking a hard look at the RMC-1(L).
The PEQ works very well and settings can be directly imported from REW.

It's nice the have the analog inputs but processors are moving to all digital.

- Rich

 

[audimus]

It would be nice to get something like the Outlaw 976 at a very different price point but with a good brand reputation for value in the review mix. How do they compare to the mass market AVRs at one end and the audiophile brand names in the other.

I am more interested in knowing what happens with these units at different price points and QPR evaluation than chasing after some desktop DAC performance. But, of course that requires someone to have units like this and be able to submit for review. That is certainly a limitation of this site.

 

[Dj7675]

Your choice/decision may depend upon usage. If HT, or in a system that does both, the XMC-2 may be a good choice and is likely to also exhibit similar performance (so at or near the top of the AVR/AVP heap). Emotiva claims to focus on good sound above all (yeah, but...) They also have a rep for bugs that sometimes take a while to fix, if ever. Flip a coin. Catch is there is little in its price range with the same feature set, and of course the trade-in deal is really good. I had some significant bugs when I got mine, but that was almost a year after it was introduced (waited until Dirac Live was available), then it was solid if a little quirky until the v3 video board mess. And I've been following the RMC-1 saga. This (October 2019) is the month they said the trade-in program would start; we'll see, and if they can deliver. Historically they've been late but they have shipped some XMC-2's. I'd probably wait a month and see what the initial response is and see if they get Dirac Live up and running on it.

I doubt any AVR/AVP is going to do all that well at this point. Hopefully Amir and others will perform solid testing showing their drawbacks and drive some improvements. I can see compromises in a <$1k or even <$2k unit (keep having to reality-check my price ranges), but a "flagship" ought to do better IMO.

Thanks for chiming in. This would be almost 100% for home theater use. I have a separate system for 2 channel music.
I imagined there would be a stronger correlation of price/performance of these pre/pros tested. Some of these units are getting up there in price but the performance doesn’t really seem to match the price tag. Makes me consider a few generations older Marantz like a 7703 or 7704 that is stable and is compatible with the Audissey app.
I would also like to see one of the more recent marantz/denon receivers tested. Something like a Denon x4400 or x4500h or Marantz equivalent. I would be very curious how they would do.
Because I picked this up for such a good price, I am still leaning towards getting an XCM2 when it is available to upgrade have Amir test it and see how it does. I will also be sure to scan the emotiva form and avsforum for users experience also. It does need to be stable.

 

[ZeDestructor]

BTW anyone else love the fact that in the back of the Altitude 32 there's a standard PC motherboard port cutout, indicating the whole thing is based on a PC architecture of some kind:

That's a matter of taste and preference, and how well they implement it.

Not me. Unless something has changed, their "tablet" UI was just remote login into Windows on the thing making it hard to navigate.

For me that's absolutely brilliant, since I'd use the "tablet" interface from a laptop in the first place. Personally I'm baffled at why all these AVRs don't have all the advanced config exposed via a decent WebUI with a sensible structure and all that jazz and instead rely on doing an atrocious job overlaying their UIs....

 

[Dj7675]

With a little help from google, I located what Don has already described on the Emotiva forum here.

@amirm If this is a situation that is triggered by the the analyzer and doesn't really exhibit the behavior under normal use, would this change any of the SINAD numbers, or your opinion of the unit? Besides this one quirk, it seems to better quite a lot of the other units (even though it doesn't hit its own specs). Or am I off on this? I guess the next question of course, if this issue is still there in the XMC2 or RMC1.

A quote from KeithL regarding this:
"Several people have already hit on the situation quite accurately.

The digital processing in the XMC-1 is quite "deterministic" - there are very few situations where two different XMC-1's are going to play the EXACT SAME digital audio stream and behave differently. (Most of the digital processing is essentially a computer running a program; if two different computers run the same set of calculations, and neither is outright broken, they will generally produce the same exact answer). However, depending on the digital audio you're playing, and on your source equipment, the digital data stream itself may be very different in several ways.

Most albums and CDs never actually have "pure digital silence" - because dither is normally applied to digital audio - including the track gaps. And some player programs will play audio continuously - without stopping and starting the data stream, while others will fill the gap between tracks with dithered silence, or with true silence; some will allow the clock to continue between songs (the two songs are played as "one track" so there is no gap). And some players will do one or the other of these depending on what options you have selected (jRiver has one mode with track gaps, one without gaps, and one where tracks change using an overlapping fade). The exact mechanism will also depend on the sample rates, and on the mode you have selected - for example, if you're playing in WASAPI mode, and a song follows one recorded at a different sample rate, then the audio stream MUST stop and restart - because it must change sample rates. And, to put it bluntly, while we know most of what's going on inside the XMC-1, we didn't write every line of code used by the DSPs, and you probably don't know exactly what your player does under all conditions either.

I can tell you for certain that the output "hard" muting on the XMC-1 is activated when the XMC-1 is turning on and turning off, it is operated by "physically" shorting the output to ground, and it does NOT enable between songs or tracks. I can also tell you that the DACs we used in the XMC-1 do in fact have an option to "mute on repeated digital zeros" - and that we have DISABLED that option. I can also confirm that, at some point in the signal path, digital signals are still muted under some conditions when a series of digital zeros are received. This happens somewhere inside the XMC-1's DSP code - which we didn't write and have no direct control over. (And the reason that most of you never encounter this is that, most of the time, a digital data stream will never contain true zeros rather than dithered silence. However, we have no way of knowing, for example, if Sonos has chosen to fill blank spots with digital zeros when certain settings are in effect.) You will also find that many advanced players have options that may address this issue. (For example, when you RIP CDs with jRiver, it has an option to include a specified number of milliseconds of silence at the beginning of each track.)

However, to return to the original subject, since this is a detail of how the XMC-1 responds to a certain specific structure in the digital audio data, it is neither something you should expect a different XMC-1 to do differently (under exactly the same conditions), nor something that we can "fix" either in your current XMC-1, or by giving you a new/different one. We do continue to review and improve the code that runs the XMC-1 whenever we see an opportunity to do so, so we may in fact eventually succeed in further reducing such issues, or even eliminating them entirely, but in the mean time we can't simply "fix" it... and we have no hardware update which will make it go away."

 

[miero]

This is discontinued product. I have lots to review. Does it make sense to spend more time on it?

The beheaded pink panther was awarded due to that bug/feature. I say it would be a fair to recheck it if it is really data truncating or just harmless muting on low-signal.

 

[audimus]

That explanation just seems to say “don’t return the unit for exchange or ask for a firmware fix” but not a satisfactory one otherwise, just excuses. Not something you would expect for a unit priced at this level.

First of all, it seems to imply that most sources have no digital zeros and therefore you shouldn’t worry about it in practice. Wrong answer. The user most of the time has no control over the input (unless you are a geek that knows how to tweak settings in players to fit the processor). The processor should be able to handle digital zeros. Most units do this, it is to be expected. This is like the problem Paradigm PW units have with handling silences where it makes a pop under some circumstances. It depends on how one feeds it, it could be a non-issue or it could be annoying. But that is priced at a couple of hundred dollars. I am happy to keep the PW link since I don’t hear any pops in my setup, very cheap for excellent room correction and any pops too low to be noticed.

Second, pointing at some third party code in DSP as responsible for it that they can do nothing about is a fail on Emotiva’s part. Either develop your own code or have control on/agreements with what your supplier provides. When you sell it, you take responsibility for it. Whose DSP are they using?

If that code can be updated, then update it. If your firmware upstream can replace the sequence that triggers this with inaudible bit sequences that won’t then do it. If that code cannot be updated or it can be but you didn’t build the necessary structure to do a field update, then man up and say we made a mistake, something we will fix with a generous upgrade to the next unit as they are apparently doing.

If they have said the above elsewhere, then OK. This is like buying the first model year of a car or v1.0 software with bugs to fix even if everything else works fine.

So, with that known defect I don’t see how this version of the unit can be recommended but it would still be good to test and document what it actually does when such “digital zeros” are fed and whether it results in pops or clicks or lost initial sounds due to unmuting delays. Don’t know what testing input would simulate that.

 

[Dj7675]

@DonH56 and @RichB both use the XMC-1. Either of you run into the muting issue while using your XMC1?

 

[Blumlein 88]

@DonH56 and @RichB both use the XMC-1. Either of you run into the muting issue while using your XMC1?

A friend has the very first version. If I ever get stars aligned, I intended to test it. I suppose right now I might check and see if the early versions did this. To my ears, with only uncontrolled listening to go by, this is a very good sounding unit. My friend purchased it for his two channel with sub rig so he could use quality amps and have room correction for his Soundlab speakers. My friend and I have owned some high performance gear, and this hasn't disappointed. Yes just like all the subjective reviews of gear.

OTOH, most avr gear does disappoint under the same conditions. Want to buy an Emotiva UMC 200 pre/pro? I've one in excellent condition I'll let go at a good price.

 

[amirm]

Dataset is another, perhaps "the" other player in this field, but they stumbled badly from what I've read and are working to recover.

I read some place that the new Monoprice processor is designed by Datasat!

 

[audimus]

I read some place that the new Monoprice processor is designed by Datasat!

Datasat was acquired by ATI a couple of years ago and ATI already has a OEM relationship with Monoprice. ATI brings in hardware expertise and Datasat brings in software expertise. But for some reason they have still kept separate product lines and even overlapping ones but I believe they are all manufactured by ATI in their facilities now, even the Datasat designs.

 

[JohnPM]

Anything below -90 dB FS or so is (potentially*) going to be muted. How much real-world impact that has I could not say. But it means your resolution is limited to about 15 bits.

The -90 dBFS sine wave is accurately reproduced which suggests a sustained period of data continuously below -90 dBFS is required to trigger the muting. As such it doesn't seem accurate to describe the device as having 15 bit resolution.

 

[Dimifoot]

 

[DonH56]

I read some place that the new Monoprice processor is designed by Datasat!

ATI bought Datasat and the new Monoprice processor is sourced by ATI sooo... yeah.

I have no first-hand knowledge, so take with grain of salt about Datasat's issues. But, there are a lot of threads about it on other fora, and I have spoken to a couple of users and a dealer about some of the problems they (and Trinnov) have had recently. Trinnov haad an HDMI board problem, now fixed, and apparently handled it well by updating the boards either through dealer/service centers or letting users self-install (as did Emotiva with their v3 board for the XMC-1).

One other point, thinking on the XMC-1 upgrade, is that they do not have a FW upgrade scheme that checks for valid FW like most every other component I have used. If you load the wrong FW, you can brick the processor, and the only recovery mechanism is to return to the factory. The few companies I have dealt with (including mine) provide user SW tools so you can recover from a field failure. Emotiva exacerbated the problem by releasing one FW rev that included a bug they introduced themselves that would brick the processor if a certain configuration was in use at the time of the install. Hmph...

 

[DonH56]

@DonH56 and @RichB both use the XMC-1. Either of you run into the muting issue while using your XMC1?

Yes, as I mentioned above, but not during normal playback of music or movies. Happens at start-of-day, when formats change (e.g. from menu to movie), and between tracks on some CDs. I am pretty sure it only occurs with digital 0's and presumably after a certain threshold is passed.

 

[DonH56]

The -90 dBFS sine wave is accurately reproduced which suggests a sustained period of data continuously below -90 dBFS is required to trigger the muting. As such it doesn't seem accurate to describe the device as having 15 bit resolution.

Yes, I agree, and think that it is an artifact, but suspect there is no easy work-around and agree with @amirm that it is not really worth digging deeper for a discontinued product. Unless there is an easy way to add dither and scale it down somehow or otherwise "fool" the processor.

 

[RichB]

I am aware of the issue that some had with digital zeros but I use the XMC-1 for HT only and have never experienced it.
For 2-channel, I had used the XLR ins and Reference Stereo mode and now use the Benchmark LA4.

I have done some level matched comparisons between the XMC-1 and LA4 and felt that at 2.83 volts there were some recording that perhaps sounded better with a LA4 but it was very close.

Just looking at the images, the XMC-2 shares a similar logic board, but the power supply went from linear to SMPS, the DACs are new (now AKM), all channels are balanced (mono-mode on the front 3 channels). It seems unlikely that the digital zero issue was carried forward to the new platforms.
I think Emotiva moved from the MDS platform to their own home grown. That may mean more growing pains but should improve their control and ability to fix issues.

The new HDMI 2.0b video board is used in the XMC-1, XMC-2, RMC-1, and RMC-1L and some issue appear to be in common.
The HTP-1 should arrive in November and others in Q12020. Emotiva is on the clock now to nail any remaining HDMI issues and deliver Dirac Live 2.0. These products are expensive, and with the recent announcements, I expect that this may slow sales for Emotiva while folks wait.

- Rich