Sorry guys, I feel like I'm letting all of you down who may like be toying with the idea or actively trying to pursue budget separates, I know so little at this stage that it could be me, obviously emotiva might be finicky but some people at emotiva lounge state that when they have played with the cabling like going unbalanced rather than balanced they got the XPA5 to stop acting up. A lot of fuss and bother, but there is a cost I suppose to doing things on the cheap. I would not have gone down this path if I'd known what I was in for but now I'm here I will persist just a bit more, unfortunately I'm a to the bitter end kind of guy, the amp sounds great when it's working and perhaps there's some element in the setup that could be pushing this sensitive amp (at least the amp in my living room if not the model itself) over the edge.
Updates on my latest mistakes to correct any previous misinformation:
1) The Yamaha did not shut down, a fuse in the surge protector blew, I made the mistake of not switching the power cord over to the high current audio section. After replacing the fuse and plugging the Yamaha into an appropriate outlet, it does not shut down even at max volume, but the distortion is pretty scary, and when I turn it down to 0db or a little above it sounds alright but not as dynamic as what I was looking for in my size room (95wpc into 8 ohms all channels driven, currently running two M80s only).
2) Last night I read through both the Yamaha and Emotiva manuals more or less cover to cover and found on pg 28 that I had not run the Yamaha "Advanced Setup" covered in full detail on pg 106 to set the speaker impedance. The speaker impedance is not switchable via the GUI operated by remote control which only gives you "Basic Setup" and "Speaker Setup", you have to sit on the floor, power down, hold the tone control while powering back on and then you use the tone control to switch from min 8 ohms to min 6 ohms, the 6 ohm setting also supports 4 ohms through the fronts. This is important to facilitate volume impedance matching, e.g., the pre out and front speaker out signals carry the same signal level. I powered on the emotiva and as expected there was no improvement, the amp shut down as previously described, with leds maybe half way out but certainly not pegged, although they look as if they want to go to toward full led status before the protection fault kicks in.
You guys warned me about the manuals, I would have thought Yamaha would let you know about the importance of the impedance setting sooner in the manual than page 28, which on the second column states: "Caution If you are to use 6 ohm speakers, set SP IMP to 6 ohms MIN as follows BEFORE using this unit." Shouldn't that be one of the first things stated? I guess they assume low end unit, low end speakers, or something like that.
It looks like I've been spoiled by the quick start manuals that come with most electronics where you follow the basic recipe that includes all the essential elements and then you read the whole manual cover to cover later once you are in the mood to consider tweaking, apparently that's not the case with HT receivers.
