Noise gate on UMC-1? -> silent sounds are muted

Never heard of this one. I suggest you call emotiva and ask to speak to Tech support, and to Lonnie if he's there.

I've never experienced that either. You might try loading 7.04.19 firmware along with another reset.

Make sure you've not inadvertently pressed the Dolby V button.


Robert

Here's what I found out so far:

- I'm running a sine wave at approx -64dBFS (on a standard -10dBV consumer line level output), this seems to be the threshold. A little louder and you hear the sine, a little less loud and the UMC mutes thinking its just input noise(?)

- At the input setup, I can gain the input by +10dB. However the gate threshold is still the same.

- When messing around a bit in the menu's, settings, speaker levels, etc, sometimes the sound comes back. Even when not changing anything at all or returning back to previous state I hear the sound like it should. Sometimes even a sine at -70dBFS is audible for a minute or so. So I know it's not a hardware feature, it's pure DSP based. Eventually the gate kicks back in muting low level sounds.

- The HDMI output is not affected by this. Only the analogue multichannel output and the rec & mix outputs.

- The gate is channel coupled. When turning up the sound on the left channel only, the right channel is audible too, where it was previously muted.

- New firmware doesn't seem to help. Both 7.4.19 and previous 7.01.00.13 have this problem. Is there any way of restoring even older firmware, anyone?

- It's no hardware issue either, I've switched all i/o and dsp boards.

My conclusion would be Emotiva is using this sort of noise gate to boost on-off signal/noise ratio on paper. Maybe nobody notices it because the input level needs to be very low on all channels, maybe it's analogue only.
Obviously I'm not listening to sine waves all day long , but this happens a lot on low level background sounds. As a filmsound editor it's kinda hard to edit like this.

Is anyone able to test this? Use a device with an analogue volumepot (no pc with digital volume control), playback the sound at at very very low level, turn the Emotiva all the way up. At some point the audio is still audible and then it just mutes. Remember it has to be very low level.

Any response or confirmation on this issue from Emotiva would be appreciated also. I'll try emailing too.

This is more likely a symptom of your sub than the UMC. If there is an LFE or sub signal, the UMC sends it, it's up to the amplifier on your subs to sense the signal and turn on. There isn't some low point that the UMC just decides to not send a signal at all. When you're adjusting the trim, you're just upping the signal to the point that your subwoofer finally says "oh hey, there is a signal here maybe I should turn on". It's simply a side effect of an auto on feature, some subwoofer amps aren't as sensitive as others.

It's low level for a sine, I agee, but on normal sounds the threshold seems higher, probably due to RMS measurement instead of peak (big difference when using normal sounds).
For example, background crickets in the desert, on a level you would hear in the finalmix of a film, or any other ambient sound actually (apart from loud industry noises and such). When listening to clean dialogue tracks (with on set ambient sounds) I always miss the first 2 words because the gate is still closed.

I got confirmation now by Emotiva there is a noisegate present on analogue inputs, but should be at a much lower level than I am experiencing (-130dB on a -10dBV output). No solution yet though...

I am using a mixer, but it's all digital these days, eventually the sound comes out of the ProTools system, needs to pass some sort of preamp for volume control and prologic decoding if needed, and then goes to the (active) speakerset. So basically it's a 5.1 volume knob and prologic decoder. Any consumer a/v receiver will do perfectly for that.
I got 5 studio's, 2 with 'professional' preamps, others have digital monitoring (as in aes/ebu straight to the speaker system with it's own remote control), but for a basic editing suite the umc-1 is perfect.

Hi Folks

Thought I was imagining things but I too have noticed this, at first through the speakers but it is very obvious while using Zone 2 for Headphone listening, it’s really only noticeable with quiet passages especially listening to classical music, the ambient noise level will drop and re-appear if a louder sound is made.
It’s also present with HDMI signals and I notice it fairly often while streaming movies from Netflix.
I double-checked by running my sources direct to my analogue pre-amp (Bryston BP-25P) and the UMC-1 and both to my headphone set-up, so I can do a direct A/B comparison, no drop-outs at all with Bryston.
To better describe the issue it’s similar to when listening to older analogue recordings with tape hiss transferred to cd, the hiss disappears between tracks but in this case it’s during quiet passages, music or video.

Robert

I bought my UMC-1 less than a month ago. I also have the issue of the muting, both from my turn table (analog) and PS3 (hdmi). I can actually hear it cycling on/off with only the UMC-1 and XPA-5 plugged in, and turned on. No other interconnects besides UMC-1 --> XPA-5. I seem to have enough noise that is triggering it on and off.

Would be interesting to know the cause, I first noticed it listening to a piece by György Ligeti where the violins were doing an extremely quite passage and then dropped out all together until the sound increased, I thought that was weird as I’ve been listening to this piece for over 25 years.
I then bypassed the UMC-1 and listened again, sure enough the violins continued but the level was just above the ambient noise floor.
So it’s either a gate or just the sensitivity of the pre-amp section but an odd occurrence none the less, I’ll contact Emotiva and see what they have to say.