OK, Johnny B, we'll see about Emotiva.

[tomteriffic]

OK, John, I took a plunge on an Emotiva piece.

The amp driving my studio monitor system finally gave out after about 35 years and, naturally, I'm in mid-project with a deadline. It was an old English-built Rotel 40 watt integrated that performed way out of its league and price range and served me well for many years. RIP.

So, I could either get some powered monitors (and I just might yet) or replace the amp. Since I have a lot tied up in the project itself, I'm pretty skint and could actually do without an extra expenditure at all, So powered monitors are out for now. Besides, even though my existing monitors are dated and certainly lack the "wow" factor of some newer stuff, I trust them, I know them, the mixes I do on them translate very well and that's what matters.

So, anyway, I popped for the little Emotiva mini-x-a-100 50 watter. It's a good match power-wise for my monitors (80 watts at 6 ohms and 40 will blow you out the back door), so we'll see if this little bugger has the kind of current delivery and reserves that the Rotel had.

Report after I live with it for a while.

PS, it's on super-duper sale right now and will walk through your front door for about $175 shipped.

P.S., i threw an old Radio Skank 100 wpc receiver into the breach as a stopgap. It was supposedly their top for the pile receiver in the day. Long story short, I'm just hopping back and forth between 4 sets of headphones rather than listen to that awful thing. I really didn't realize how good that Rotel was until it croaked.

[JohnnyB]

Armitage is the big fan of Emotiva amplification, but with this sale, if I had a good excuse I'd get a couple of them. The volume control is a great touch, as are the daisy-chaining I/Os, where you can pass the signal on to more of these amps (or to powered subwoofers). Two of these for a paltry $350 would give you bi-amping capability for speakers with dual terminals. Two would stand side-by-side on a standard equipment shelf/rack.

The fact that it has an FTC rating of 80 wpc into 4 ohms is a pretty good indicator that it has some decent current. This is a direct competitor to the Parasound Zamp v.3, which I already have. The Zamp has a higher claimed s/n ratio, but the Emotiva has higher power ratings into both 8 and 4 ohms and weighs 63% more (usually indicating a heavier power supply for better current delivery). Going back to the Crown D-75, I've always had a soft spot for compact high current amps.

And here's an encouraging professional review. Guttenberg writes for Stereophile and Home Theater, among other audio mags.

[tomteriffic]

I had been considering the Parasound and its companion preamp for a bedroom system and it crossed my mind for this situation too. But the combination of price, weight as an indicator of the quality of the power supply and the front panel volume control swung it strongly toward the Emotiva. The bit of extra power doesn't hurt either. I monitor at a variety of volumes and the easiest and most direct way to do that for me is to reach under the desk and give the knob a twist. Things would have been more complicated with the Zamp.

Stay tuned.

[tomteriffic]

OK, now that I've had a chance to spend some quality time with it....

First impressions:

It came through the door on this past Thursday and upon unpacking it I observed that it was not only double boxed, but both of the boxes were double-wall construction. That's probably a pretty good thing since this really is pretty hefty, particularly for its size. I was surprised to see that it was made in China. Don't know why, but I thought these were US made. Of course for the price, I was probably just dreaming. Not-so-good: no manual in the box. Better: two spare fuses.

A peek through the vent slots revealed quite a hunk of foil shielded doughnut by way of a toroidal transformer. i didn't measure it or anything, but when swapping the amp out for the POS Radio Shack receiver that was nominally twice as powerful, I could see that the transformer in there was nowhere near the size. Also, the weight was about the same, despite the old receiver being twice (or more) the chassis size.

The 5-way binding posts made speaker hookup easy with my short runs of eons old 14 gauge mid-grade Monster stuff. The RCA loop-through jacks right next to the input jacks warrant a double-check before you button everything up and shove the amp into place.

So, how did it go?

In a word, swimmingly. As mentioned before, I'm in the midst of doing some final tweaks and mastering of a project. I had resorted to going back and forth between three mid-grade and one pretty damn decent sets of headphones to try to get some idea of what I was listening to, should be hearing, etc. The rat shack receiver had very low signal to noise, especially at lower or moderate listening levels. It seemed that it was kind of a steady state noise that didn't vary much with actual volume. But when I'd goose the level in an attempt to hear over this low level garbage, the thing would go into a bit of "tizzy" sounding distortion on the high end of the spectrum. And when you're trying to listen for unwanted distortion, clipping, etc. in your signal, having that distortion overlay makes it impossible to tell what's what. And, to make things worse, the thing was very fatiguing to listen to. And while the cans were OK, my fat head and big ears make wearing any pair of cans for any appreciable amount of time pretty uncomfortable.

So, in goes the Emotiva. Lo and behold, I've got low end again! And dynamics! And no distortion! And no noise! The fist thing I did was go back to the last few cuts I had worked on while switching back and forth between the various cans. To the headphones' credit, there were a few gentle, broad timbral adjustments that were made or undone upon review, but they really didn't do too badly.

I went back to a one-mike-one take recording we had done, with the three of us just gathered around a large diaphragm condensor in an omni pattern, and the instruments/amps at varying distances in what was pretty much a "let the chips fall where they may" kind of deal. The resultant recording was better than the performance it captured, but overall the performance wasn't hateful. But as I had listened to it through the rat shack receiver I could tell that something had changed, that someplace during editing or something, it had gotten dirty. Or was it the amp??. But with the old receiver and it's veil of high frequency distortion, I was damned it I could tell if it was the recording or not.

With the Emotiva in place, it became obvious. Someplace along the line a little squidge of digital clipping had crept in. i went back to an earlier iteration of the recording and the Emotiva told me immediately that the earlier version didn't have it and I was able to re-do the editing, and schmoozing with confidence.

Over the next day or so, I went on with the remaining cuts that needed auditioning, tweaking here and there and then listening to the cuts in various sequences to determine the best track sequence for the final result. This is pretty critical, concentrated stuff and can be very time-consuming and tedious, even. For not only do you have to consider things like tempo, key and subject matter, you have to consider the sonics (level, frequency response, dynamics, etc.) going from one track to the next. You wind up doing a lot of rearranging and some compromising with the sonics to make a smooth (or sometimes utterly jarring, if that's what you're after) transition from one cut to the next.

In the midst of this, I looked up and I realized that, with the occasional break to sort of clear my aural palate, I'd been at it for about six hours. WAY enough for this sort of thing. But my keester and back were in far worse shape than my ears were. I was not fatigued one bit. The Emotiva was a pleasure to work with.

This morning I hit the ground running and went down and checked my work. All good. I then put the cuts in their final sequence, burned a master CD and listened to it intently all the way through. All good again. Then that disc went around to the home theatre system, a small boom box, some crappy iPod type earbuds and finally went with us in the car to the gig tonight. Now, the goal here is not to create something that sounds freakin' awesome in all of these circumstances. Cant be done. The real goal is to get things sounding at least acceptable and not grossly out of whack in some way or another in each of these situations. The master did that. Only one small tweak to a transition might be necessary.

This is testament to the Emotiva. My monitors, aged though they may be, have always given me mixes I can trust and that translate well to other environments. The death of the Rotel put a damper on that but this Emotiva has stepped up and filled the need and more. The ol' Rotel was rated at 40 continuous watts but had some good headroom. I don't know where the headroom limit is on the Emotiva. It just handled everything effortlessly and didn't wear me out doing it.

If you've got a pair of speakers that can do 50 to 80 watts and be happy, you could do loads worse than this little thing. Hell, if you have a quality line-level source and just need one input, the Emotiva does well as a minimalist integrated amp.

Higly recommended. It's a steal at full price and if you can catch a sale, it's even moreso. I'm thinking about getting another. I don't particularly need it just yet, but there's still that bedroom system to upgrade and the little Athenas in there would appreciate some better power pushing them.....

Oh, a quick PS. On one of the cuts in question there had initially been a keyboarded "two cellos and a viola" kind of low string section. It was there to lend a bit more of a legato feel to an arrangement that had a number of single note lines and not much chordal type stuff from any of the other instruments. In the end, we decided to keep it but at a very, very low level, like something like -50 or 60 db, to just serve as some barely audible sonic "glue" to help hold the arrangement together. On the old amp (and on couple of other listening systems), I was just taking it on faith that that string bed was down in there. I couldn't hear through the mix well enough to tell. No problem once the Emotiva was up and running. It brought a lot of transparency back to that recording.

[JohnnyB]

Hey Tom, excellent evaluation and tone report! At $175 delivered, that thing's a no-brainer, and two of them totaling $350 for 100 watts-per-side and the ability to bi-amp is sweeter still.

IME there are certain amplifier parameters that make a big difference in resolution and long time musical enjoyment. One is high current to be able to supply constant voltage in the face of fluctuating (and sometimes wildly fluctuating) speaker impedances. Another is signal-to-noise ratio, which has a lot to do with conveying both dynamic range and those low level details you heard so much better with this Emotiva. And the third is bandwidth, not because you need to hear out to 100 KHz, but for the benefit it confers on the rise time of every signal. I use a 30-year-old Heathkit power amp that was way ahead of its time in 1981. Its -3dB point is 100 Khz and its s/n is 100 dB. It was a noticeable improvement over my previous amps. This little Emotiva has similar numbers. Lower powered SS amps (about 70 wpc and below) also tend to have a sonic advantage with one pair of bipolar transistors per side. Component matching gets trickier when you have to have more output devices per side operating within 1% (or less) of each other.

I was curious about one thing: you were monitoring a lot through headphones. What was your signal chain for that, and how did the new amplifier help?

BTW, you can get the manual here.

[carfish7]

Would this unit be a suitable power amp for a pair of Yamaha NS-10M's? They rate 60w program and 120w max power handling. I'm using a Samson amp and wonder if this might help keep these things from kicking my ass after an hour or 2? Thanks!

[JohnnyB]

Would this unit be a suitable power amp for a pair of Yamaha NS-10M's? They rate 60w program and 120w max power handling. I'm using a Samson amp and wonder if this might help keep these things from kicking my ass after an hour or 2? Thanks!

The Emotiva is going to have enough reliability and stability for home studio use (it even has a thermostatically controlled fan) while having an audiophile sensibility of sounding more natural and less electronic than run-of-the-mill studio electronics. I have no direct experience with the Yamaha NS-10M's, but from what I've read around the I-net they have a tendency to sound fatiguing over time. Still, compared with something like the Samson amp, the Emotiva should buy you at least another hour or two before the listening fatigue sets in.

As an alternative, a reasonably priced studio amp series I've heard good things about--even in audiophile forums-- is the A.R.T. Pro Audio studio amplifiers. But right now the Emotiva on sale is nearly $100 less than ART's SLA-1.

[carfish7]

Thank you Sir!

[tomteriffic]

What Johnny said. The NS-10M's are pretty fatiguing and really aren't meant to be primary monitors in a studio. They're more a "real world reference" , intended to sound something like your average "mid-fi" bookshelf speakers in a home setup. But, as John said, something like the Emotiva would certainly buy you some more time and is a good match for the Yamahas power-wise.

John, neither the new amp or the old one was part of the headphone signal chain. The signal comes out of the audio interface into two channels of a Mackie 1604 VLZSomething. The gain controls are set for a healthy level but way short of clipping. The signal is then sent straight to the master L/R faders where it can either drive the power amp or it's own very healthy headphone amp. So, whether it was cans or the amp/speakers, they were driven by the same source chain.

For what it's worth, the headphones involved were: Sony MDR-7506, AKG 240's (really old ones that are pretty hard to drive), Shure SRH 440's and a pair of Grado SR 80's. I'm not sure what the 240's or their descendants are going for these days, but the Sonys and Shures are right in that $100 range. The Grados are in that ballpark too, but are worlds apart in terms of design and tonality. For tracking and such, they're pretty useless since they are an open back design, so they usually live upstairs. But I brought them down for the occasion. If I had been forced to do all this on one pair of cans and that's it, my choice would easily have been the Grados. They're also the most comfortable for me to wear.

A little PS to anyone else reading this. The Sony MDr7506's are light years away from the other Sonys in the general price range. And the Sennheiser 280s are virtual clones of the 7506's, sonically speaking and are the same price. Try them both and see which are more comfortable.

[JohnnyB]

Concerning headphones: Except when you're trying to monitor and mix in a noisy environment, I don't see the attraction of closed back headphones. It's difficult to do a closed-back design and have an uncanned sound. Open-back phones sound more like open-air sound. Although the AKG 240's surround the ear (i.e., circumaural), they are still open-back, and they were originally designed specifically for monitoring. The idea was to design and agree on a headphone (at least in Europe) that everyone could use regardless of their choice of studio monitors for consistent monitoring and mixdown. I had a pair of K240 DFs, the ones with the individual response curves included in the package. They were indeed pretty neutral, though with their higher impedance and power requirements. are rather dark without a quality headphone amp to drive them. I never got around to getting one before they were stolen out of my car. And before the AKD 240's, the most common studio 'phones were the very open back, on-ear Sennheiser HD-414's and HD-424's.

Whether you find your Grado SR80's useful for monitoring, they are certainly a good choice for comfortable listening. I have a pair of the SR60's. Recently age, sunlight, and my new chew-huahua reduced the original earpads to foam dust. Instead of getting the original replacements, I instead got a pair of Sennheiser earpads.

I picked them because I have an Amazon Prime subscription which gave me free 2-day shipping. Anyway, it turned out that the best part is that these earpads make the Grado SR60/80 'phones sound better than with the OEM earpads. More transparency, more clarity, more musical involvement, and more bass extension. The yellow pads also make a nice contrast with the basic black headphones. Get a set and you won't regret. It's like upgrading to OFC wiring and better drivers. Not bad for $12.70 and highly recommended.

[tomteriffic]

John, I'm not sure I made it clear that the headphones were only a last resort, brought on by the time crunch involved, but agreed on every point. Those were the 240's I have, BTW. Oh, and I did the earpad upgrade on the Grados at the time that I originally bought the cans.

[JohnnyB]

John, I'm not sure I made it clear that the headphones were only a last resort, brought on by the time crunch involved, but agreed on every point. Those were the 240's I have, BTW. Oh, and I did the earpad upgrade on the Grados at the time that I originally bought the cans.

Well Tom, I'm sure you know what you're doing and I was just seeing if there's something I'd missed. Looks like K240s are still running somewhere around $87-100, with the Studio Standard and MkII versions at $135-ish. Doesn't look like the DF version exists anymore, but the Studio Standard is probably the modern equivalent. Then they also have some upscale models such as the Quincy Jones and the K701s (which I heard great things about).

When you bought upgraded pads with your SR-80s, did you get the larger Grado pads (made for the bigger earpieces) or the Sennheiser retrofits?

[tomteriffic]

I got the larger Grados for my wife's pair and the Sennheisers for mine. Sonically, it's a toss-up really. At the time, the Grados were more expensive and being a cheap SOB, I went for the Sennheiser. Now my wife keeps trying to swipe mine just because of the color.