Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HT in-progress

Well, that was the easiest, fastest exchange I ever went though. Monday I emailed support. Got an email to call back the next day. On Tuesday epson support answered their phone with-in 5mins … another 20minutes to verify stuff and today, Thursday, the replacement unit has arrived. Now just need to test, install and send the broken one back … hopefully I will find some time tomorrow….

Commendations to Epson. A great warranty experience makes for great word-of-mouth advertising. It's unfortunate that some (most?) companies view it as a business expense and try to obfuscate the process, thinking that it's a win when the customer gives up. I personally move on to competitors when I get a sub-par ownership experience.

This will motivate me to try to get a hold of Harman/JBL today to do the headphone warranty claim that I've been putting off.

Checking out the latest projectors … epson came out with an upgrade to mine, the QB1000B, which from the spec looks almost the same except it’s rated at 3300 lumens (600 more), has dynamic tone mapping, HDMI is now HDCP 2.2 (up from 2.1) for only $8000. Kind of think that getting a bit out of the value box for me … although the extra lumens and tone mapping are both high on my want list. Think for that money they should have at least thrown in 3D.

Watching the UST projector space. Keeps getting better and cheaper … certainly would solve my family room field of view issue (I’d move the LG to the bedroom. That is, if my wife can get over having a tv in that space) …. but still by the time your done with a projector & screen your talking $3k-4k.

Wanted to test out doing 9.4.4 so I replaced my rear M5´s with a pair of M22´s and Installed the M5´s as wides. I then added a pair of M3ow´s I had and was going to move the top mids back but decided to wait and just use my rear heights as top rears. The top rear position was right over my 2nd row and if I push them back they would have been right next to the rear heights. So rather then move them I thought … just try it.


The front heights and the mid tops in the picture are not being used. The rear heights are just out of the picture.

Anyway …. WOW.

Not only did the vertical expand … the whole bed surround exploded with stuff I was only getting hints of before. Ít´s way beyond just getting a bit more vertical separation … everything came alive. I think that Marantz optimized their surround for this setup (9.4.4) and never really spent the time to get setups with heights working well. But why would adding wides (or taking away heights) suddenly make all the other surrounds light up. I spent the rest of the day just playing different disks and streams … it´s a whole new system. I’m going to have to rewatch everything (not that I have time for it).

Rereading the last post I didn’t tell you where I added the M3ow’s … I’m sure you figured it out … added as fronts tops …
I might try moving the mid tops to the rear top position but using the rear heights as rear tops is sounding pretty good from all the seats so far

Thinking that I may have been premature in suspecting the 8805 not decoding height correctly.

When I changed over to 9.4.4 I also swapped out my ADA1000-8 for a ADA1250-8. I was unhappy with the 1000 because I was getting a very low level hum from it. It was low enough it was drowned out by the projector fan but it bothered me enough that I just got another amp.… I’m 98% sure why but I don’t want to say till I I’m 100% sure (so you’ll just have to wait for me to get around to looking at it). In any case this fixed something else I was having issues with … Audacity would consdiently tell me 3 to 5 speakers were out of phase. After checking all the hookups several times I just started ignoring this warning … I bet this screwed up my calibration. Now with the ADA1250 taking its place … no out of phase warnings …

My plan for the ADA1000 now is to use it to drive my shakers (as I doubt the hum or phase issues would matter) and if I can figure out these issues I’ll have a few extra channels for the future.

Do you hear any broadband noise with the 1250?

I can put my ear up to the speaker and nada. No noise at all out of the speakers… although some the amps and dps boxes have a very low transformer hum which one of these days I’m going to fix …

With the 1000 out of the picture, all the signals are now balanced (XLR). (The 1000 has only single ended inputs, I.e.RCA) … it would be interesting to see what the phase relationship of the 8805 XLR and RCA outs are. If that’s not it then I’ll look at the transfer relationship between the balanced amps and the 1000. Wouldn’t surprise me if something was reversed … We will see … I have a back log of stuff I’ve been blowing off, so it’s not going to be soon …

Thanks. That's excellent about the silence.

As most know I’m interested in high channel count prepro’s that don’t break the bank. So I started following Emotive’s RMC-1 prepro back in 2016/17. It made big promises: upgradable so it wouldn’t need to be replaced any time soon, expandable to 24 ATMOS/DTS channels, additional inputs, DIRAC Live, and more, of course it was touted as ultra high-end with a fully-balanced audio path though-out. At a price point of around $5k for the base 16 channel unit. (Other prepro’s which promised to expand beyond 16 channel were in the 10’s of 1000s of dollars.)

Unfortunately several years of sliding release dates passed before it actually shipped … and many people were stung along. When it did ship it was extremely buggy and missing functionality … IMO more an alpha release than a beta … and not something most companies would release as a working product. Today my understanding is that it’s still a little buggy and that the UI is very sluggish. Audio wise I get overall impression it’s not bad but I’ve not heard it. The output channel expansion card which most bought the RMC-1 for was a coming soon thought that never happened.

So with that in mind Emotive is replacing the RMC-1 with version 2 but I guess they want to call it an update as it’s named RMC-1+. This update is a complete replacement as everything has been “updated”. And it’s coming … soon . Guess we will see … (they did have many years of engineering and public beta testing on V1 so one can hope ).


Note: Although I’m a bit leary about this company … I get the feeling they are trying to deliver what they promised… that is they are not purposely trying to scam you … not exactly a high praise endorsement…