Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Emo amps to drive Axiom speakers

Anyone use Emotiva XPA-5 for the Axiom Speakers?

I have M80's, VP150, QS8's & QS4's . Currently driving them with Denon 3808A.

Plan to get a Emo XPA-5 to power the M80, VP150 & QS8. Leave the denon to drive the QS4.

How much difference in sound will there be with change from denon to Emo? Will it be very obvious? Or slight? Need to get the waf.

Thanks.

Different in sound? Slight to none. The extra 40 Watts over 160 will get you about 1 dB of headroom.

You should get an A-1400 from Axiom....oh wait, discontinued...nevermind

"I'm done with the forum"....NOT....broken record.

Why do you even bother? I mean your only digging yourself deeper, Mr.Balls

to make a good difference, and make the Axioms really shine, you could get a few of those amps:
http://www.qscaudio.com/products/amps/gx/specifications.php

any good amp will give the same SQ, except if you overdrive it.
with those QSCs, you will never need more power or better sound.

their fan is of the variable speed type and should rarely speed up from "low speed".

What is that ACDC song? He has the smallest balls of them all, lol.

I have a 4 year old LPA-1 powering my Axioms. No complaints. It does what it's supposed to do, day-in and day-out. Definitely worth it. If/when it ever dies, I'd replace it with another Emotiva amp. I guess you either like Emotiva's stuff, or you don't.

It made a difference in terms of SQ for me. But that was because my previous AVR would start clipping when trying to drive M80's at anything above about 85db.

I'd say go for it. If you don't like it, Emotiva has a good return policy. I know, I've taken advantage of it.

I saw on Audioholics Review site they are now coming out with a Professional Series of products, much more expensive.

I thought that got cancelled when they got purchased by someone else.

Don, there's an awful lot of nonsense without support from audio technology floating around on the internet about separate amplifiers. The fact that you asked "how much difference", rather than "any difference?" indicates that you've probably heard a lot of this stuff. The facts are that no, there isn't any good reason for there to be audibly superior performance from one when two units are both operating within their designed power limits with flat frequency response and inaudibly low noise and distortion(typical these days even at moderate cost).

Your 3808 likely has all the maximum power output needed for listening to your Axioms at safe(to your hearing)levels. A slight increase of a dB or so in maximum output capability is meaningless; unused headroom is simply that: unused.

Well, until you decide to strap your M80s together and put them on a dock...

Thanks for the advice. If there's really no audible difference I'll save my money & upgrade to a VP180. That should really make a difference for my home theatre setup with all that I'm reading from the forum.

Agreed, the speaker upgrade will do more for sound quality than an amp/receiver upgrade.

I have just a few hours to decide whether I want an Emotiva XPA-3 (for $700). I was on a waiting list, and now Emotiva says they will have some March 21, but they need to know by tomorrow whether I actually want one. I guess I'll give it a pass, for now. Some say you can expect an improvement in sound, at least sometimes, with an external amp, but some say not. I just don't know. My Onkyo 3008 was going into protection mode, trying to drive my 3 4ohm Axioms -- M80s and VP180 -- or so I thought. But I think I've found the problem there -- it was a bad wire to my right front wide M22. Now that I've rewired that speaker, no more protection mode, despite jacking up the volume higher than I'd ever seriously ever want to listen at. But I wish I knew whether the XPA-3 would actually improve my sound -- it's just so expensive to experiment with this stuff!

Tell me about it.

It's never ending...........