This hobby is a money sucker to be sure. While planning out the replacements of all of my previous equipment I'd pretty much left the speakers till the last purchase. So after spending $4500 dollars on the final component (Epic 80/800) in my new HT system I had thought I was going to be done... at least for a little while anyway! But after living with such incredible speakers for the last month, they've had quite the opposite effect on me actually. Instead of being completely and utterly satisfied with what I have now, it's fueled my thirst for even more performance! I have added sooo many things on my list now that I want to get, that I hardly knew where to start. First up, I absolutely had to get a Blu-Ray player so that I could hear the new audio formats and of course watch my movies in 1080p. So I went out and bought the Samsung BDP-3600 because I found it for $320, which I thought was a pretty good deal. It has internal decoding capabilities (a must since my 4802 does not have HDMI support), so that bought me a little time before I actually have to upgrade my receiver.
On a side note, I got the BD player all set up last night and we watched 'Handcock' and it was spectacular! I suppose it could all be in my head, but my God it sounded like I had 25 speakers in my room creating all of those wonderful sounds!!! But you know what, as was mentioned in another post somewhere, the bass was quite simply not there through the 5.1 channel analog outs! I had read that bass management suffers through the analog outs in today's new audio formats. I guess they really want you to have to get the HDMI receivers and so on. But aside from that I'm blown away by the way my system sounded, and how great the picture looked on my 65 inch LCD... WOW!!!
Ok so with the Blu-Ray player scratched off of my list I decided it was high time to get something that I've been wanting to get for years and years and years.... an external amp! I've done a lot of listening on two separate systems that had external amps running them and fell completely in love with the way speakers sound while being run with a lot of power. So I always wanted to get my own separate amp to integrate into my HT system. But before joining this forum I was one of those suckers who fell hook, line and sinker for things like power conditioners, Monster Cables, oxygen free speaker wire and all that other garbage out there designed to part a fool from his money. And I was always under the impression that I needed to buy the Denon POA-A1HDCI reference amplifier at $7500 dollars... and of course that just hasn't happened yet.
But now that I'm aware of so many things now a days, thanks to this site, I just put in my order for an Emotiva XPA-3 three channel amplifier. It pushes 300 watts per channel at 4 ohms, I'll be running my left and right mains and my center channel with it. But it also pushes 400 watts x 2 at 4 ohms, so I will definately be playing around with it in 2 channel stereo off and on to see what these M80's will do when being fed their recommended power levels! I'm so pumped I can barely contain my enthusiasm!!! Running my front 3 speakers with the Emotiva will allow the Denon to play the rear channels with more ooomph at loud levels. Like I have stated in other posts, I'm listening to my music in 5/7 channel surround these days. So this should sound fantastic!
Not that the Denon doesn't already make the Axioms sing mind you, I'd never imply that. But once I get it up to around 85 - 90% max power, it does tend to sound just a bit strained. My friend David that had the Harmon Kardon rack system with outboard amplifiers was completely different. Turning the volume up on his rig was not fatiguing in the least. Instead it reproduced music at insane listening levels effortlessly. It never gave the impression that the speakers were being fed more juice than they could handle, nor was there even a hint of distortion what-so-ever. That's the sort of performance I'm hoping to get from the Emotiva.
Now I've read less than stellar reviews about Emotiva on this board before, so I'm very anxious to see how it performs. I figured with it having basically the same kind of guarantee as my Axiom speakers have, I had nothing to lose by auditioning it. If I'm not happy with it's performance, I'll simply send it back. And to be clear, it was the Emotiva XPA-2 that was giving people fits for whatever reason. So I'm not expecting any problems out of the XPA-3. I will write a comprehensive review as I plan on doing a lot of comparison tests between playing the Emotiva + the Denon and just the Denon by itself.
Next up on my list will be getting two more QS8's, and then another two soon after. And last but not least will be an upgraded Denon with HDMI so that I can finally experience all the bass management the new audio formats pack into those Blu-Ray discs... I'm accepting donations to fund this endevor!
Last edited by Micah; 07/25/09 05:23 AM.
