Well I was sort of underwhelmed with the XPA 2 for the first day and a half watching/listening to compressed Directv HD and 1 or 2 poorly recorded CDs but then tonight I bought the bluray Hulk and Wow! What a mind blower! I was totally sold. It's funny too, you know my best friend who watched Iron Man and Hulk (multiple times with his son?) in the theater thought Iron Man was better and Rotten Tomatoes gives Iron Man a 93% and Hulk only a 67% approval rating but it made perfect sense after tonight why a number of posters here liked the Hulk better, the Hulk soundtrack is so much more engaging/fulfilling to my ear from an audio sensory perspective.

Here's the problem--the XPA 2 kept going into protect mode, not for sudden loud sounds but whenever there was a crescendo.

Problem #2: I think I might have messed up one of the inputs when I was unpacking the amp to keep from dropping it, I'm afraid 87 lbs (?, or whatever) is a bit unwieldy and that would be my main critique of the amp so far; as I get even older with even more back issues I would/will need a maintenance crew to move things around; hmmm, I wonder how I am going to the muscle the ep800 into position, I have wood floors doncha know and sliding things is an issue, of course we have felt pads glued onto the bottoms of all furniture, is that just as good sonically as the rubber feet on all this "audiophile" equipment (axiom, emotiva)?

So far on the Emotiva lounge the XPA5 has been causing red light of death issues for random folks and it's been blamed on cabling (something I need to experiment with) but no one has had trouble with the XPA2 so maybe the damaged RCA input is my problem. I can experiment with cable connections as well, is there such a thing as an RCA/unbalanced to balanced input adapter? Maybe if I avoid the busted RCA input I will be OK--I have questions though: at first the red lights were all on the left side, which is the side with the loose input, then they shifted to the right side, in which the input is OK. There is zero noise at any volume, so there is nothing so crude as that going wrong.

Also reading the Gene Dela Salla article where he was having trouble in some sort of test mode (?) when sweeping from high to low (20k to 20hz) but not on stereo playback, and it seems to me that he may not have tested the amp that much for HT (?) as opposed to music, might that correspond to the shut down on crescendo issue I am having, given that HT tends to boom out the lows increasingly during exciting sequences? More or less a random thought, but I had to wonder why the impact of sheer volume did not seem to trigger a protection/default shutdown by shaking something loose, if power alone was the issue.

Of course this has all been so exciting that I keep listening to the movie at high volumes and haven't even been annoyed by the frustrating interruptions, I would even like to keep the amp if I can work through the problems, isn't that always the way, things go wrong on Friday evening, just as soon as there's no one to call?

Well if any one has any info re: emotiva protection issues that would be cool, but as a disclaimer I must point out that since the input appears to have been damaged and no one else has reported the issue for the xpa 2 the positives I am experiencing may stand and the negatives may be irrelevant and hopefully will be resolved . . .


"If you try to turn toward it, you go against it."