Sat, when you're rocking out on the XPA-2, at the point it's cutting out, what are the status LED meters doing? Are they pegged at the far the ends of the scale? I'm just curious if you can tell that the amp is being stressed (pegged-meters) or if it's cutting out early.
For the EE guys, is there any way that Sat could hook up an ohm meter to his system to monitor the resistance when the XPA cuts out? It seems that would answer the whole question. <4ohm = M80 problem, >= 4ohm = XPA problem.
The bizarre thing here is that the folks at Emotiva
can build an amp that works. They know how to do it. As I've said, I have no problems with my LPA-1 + M80 combo at these 100db+ 'reference' levels we're talking about. None at all. And there are several others around here with the same setup. And the LPA-1 is/was their cheap amp.
But it makes no sense to me that their flagship multichannel MPS-1 and their top-end stereo XPA-2 can't drive M80's. It was absurd when Randy went through this, and it's still absurd that Sat is having the same problem. Since Emotiva claims the M80's are the problem, I'd love to see that data. They need to explain *why* the M80's seem to break some of their amps.
But from a troubleshooting perspective, I can see where Lonnie is coming from. It's still not the best response but I understand it. Since you changed speakers (were the Polks 4-ohm too?) and the XPA worked, then that points to the "problem" being the M80's. That "problem" is easily solved by getting your money back for the XPA and getting a different amp.
Either we're discovering that
some M80's have an unusual impedance dip that's too much for their amps, or we're finding that
some Emotiva amps aren't meeting their published specs with respect to 4-ohm speakers.
