Stupid stupid stupid carpet installers...
So the reason why I haven't posted in a while had to do with the planned replacement of the "bad" carpet went "bad". I haven’t had access to the web until today and have been sleeping on the floor with my wife for about a week+ instead of the one day we planned on. Long story short, I fixed the gouges, scrapes and repainted my walls in 5 rooms due to the damage the carpet folks caused.
So what does this mean? Well, tonight, I finally dug out the speakers, that were repacked, from the kitchen stuffed with a bazillion other things. In addition to this, I setup the Yamaha RX-V663 along with *drum roll* my new Emotiva XPA-5! I ended up getting this 87lbs sucker through the good graces of my CFO allowing the purchase. I hooked the speakers to the Amp using 7' 14AWG straight copper wire (I believe GE brand, bought at Lowes), and a standard 3' Radio Shack audio cable (what I had to begin with) connected the preouts on the yammie and emotiva unbalanced inputs. After the 12V trigger cable was added, I was golden. I flipped the switch and started listening to my local radio station... Yeah yeah yeah, not the first thing you want to test out with, but let me tell you how much better the radio sounds now!
I plugged in the iPod as well to play some of my music that I created years ago and I believe the speakers reproduced amazingly well! In fact, I could tell on some older tracks, the WAV files I recorded to mix with originally, there was some fuzziness that I could never tell existed on previous monitors I had! And it wasn't the sound system because other parts of the song had no-noise/empty space that was clear and crisp as expected. Another one of my tracks proved that the speakers with the amp produce a decent low bass/drum thump. All this at about -40db. I'd turn it up more, but I didn't want to wake my wife, so maybe I'll test in the morning eagerly as well.
Wow... I cannot WAIT until I move my life back into my unit and hook up the PS3 and play some CD's and Blue-Ray discs! Like I said before, I'm greatly anticipating the 2 hours I get to pop in the Matrix just to listen to the soundtrack if anything! I'm piling up a list of things to audition now... I probably won't post a response until next week, with my personal experience and findings, since I will be out of town starting this Thursday - coming back Monday.
Though I wish I could audition both the Rotel and Emotiva amps side-by-side to hear the difference, I doubt there would be much for me to care. I haven't demo'ed the speakers through the yammie, but I've thought about it just to hear the differences in sound. Maybe it doesn't really matter. I think I'm pretty happy with the Emotiva. I only plugged stuff in at this point to see if things worked, I have not optimized for the room since it's in disarray and the system is temporarily hooked up. I don't even know if my entertainment center can hold 87lbs of goodness!
