Hello folks,
I was one of the first people to get the UMC-1. So after living with the unit for about 6 months and dealing with all the trials and tribulations, here are my thoughts.
From day one, I thought the UMC-1 sounded great. Honestly, I couldn't believe how much better music sounded through it than my Yamaha 661 receiver. But from day one, I also had numerous problems. I had most of the standard issues that a lot of other people had:
1. Audio dropouts with Blu-ray, DVD's and Cable TV.
2. Emo-Q giving me crazy speaker distances and crossovers.
3. Random power down lock-ups.
Of these issues, the one that was most annoying for me was the audio drop-outs. It happened to me quite often, I would say about 30% of the time when I would fast forward, pause or rewind a movie, TV show or music track. It was frustrating as hell. At first, the only thing that would bring the audio back was to change inputs on the UMC-1 and then change back to the original source. It happened so often that I programmed a UMC-1 input change button on my Harmony One remote.
I did firmware updates to the unit 2 times, (the first 2 updates). Each time, the audio dropout problem seemed to get marginally better, but never went away. I didn't bother with Emo-Q since I wasn't really that interested with it in the first place. I'll admit that the firmware update process is not very user friendly. I swore at my laptop quite a few times during the process. After reading that people were still having issues with the last firmware update previous to this latest most current version, I didn't bother with doing another update.
Well, a couple of weekends ago, my UMC-1 started belching out smoke while watching a movie. I sent it back to Emotiva for repair. They received it on a Tuesday and had it repaired and ready to ship back to me on Wednesday!! A one-day turn around on an electronics repair is pretty amazing. So I paid the extra money to have it shipped back to my 2-day shipping so that I could hook it up last weekend. The unit was of course updated with the latest firmware.
So I am proud to report that after using the unit all last weekend, I have not had a single audio drop, (knocks wood). I watched a few movies and watched TV for a few hours just to see if I would have an issue. My TV service is DirecTV and I have the HR24 DVR.
I also have not had a shut down lock-up since I got the UMC-1 back.
I tried running Emo-Q just for the fun of it and it was still a bit off. Speaker distances were pretty close, but the crossover points were still all over the place. No problem though, I prefer setting that stuff manually anyway.
So if you've stuck with me through all of that, my point is that the UMC-1 still sounds great and I'm glad I kept it. True the issues I was having at the beginning made me want to hit it with a hammer a few times, but Lonnie and the gang at Emotiva seem to have smoothed over some of the bumps and the UMC-1 is well on it's way to being a great little processor.
