Really?
It’s a good review in that Gene went into a lot of detail and even did some measurements to document issues that buyers might be concerned about, like the various EmoQ foibles (center and surround levels too low, crossovers points not optimal); cannot easily use external level cal discs; no option to define a turn-on volume; the awkward need to manually set every crossover to 24 dB/oct if you want the subwoofer LPF to be 24 dB, etc. These are real-world insights that are important to know when evaluating surround processors.
OTOH, it’s a poor review because in several areas it is incorrect about rather simple matters that someone deeply involved in home theater should easily be able to get right.
What has lack of analog video go to do with Blu-ray’s sunset rule? Nothing. No one connects BD players to an HDMI processor with analog video.
On Enhanced Bass, Gene says: >>The “enhanced bass” setting is a great option for those that want to have their subwoofers engaged while having their main front speakers set “large” listening to two-channel music. Other manufacturers often call this “double bass” or “LFE+Main”.<<
Later he contradicts himself: >>Emotiva has given the customer something I’ve always wanted and thought would be a great idea. They allowed the end user to simultaneously send LFE info to the subwoofer channel and front main channels if they were set “large”.<< If it’s available from other manufacturers, then why is it >> something I’ve always wanted and thought would be a great idea<<? So which mode is it. Turns out that the UMC-200
does not offer a mode similar to LFE+Main, as reported. [In LFE+Main the main speakers remain full range, and the bass for those channels is also sent to the subwoofer to merge with the LFE.] The UMC-200 offers a distinctly different alternative, where LFE is spread to any speakers set to Large. He does not make it clear whether the sub will receive any bass contribution from the “large” channels or not.
The whole reason LFE was invented was to prevent the main speakers from being burdened with deep bass effects, so why a mode that does this is offered is not clear. I totally understand the idea behind LFE+Main. What's the benefit to Enhanced Bass supposed to be? Perhaps Gene could have given us some insights into that.
Then Gene stumbles again:
>> With “enhanced bass” turned on, I fed the UMC-200 an HDMI 192kHz PCM signal to the front main channels and subwoofer channel. The output produced a -32dB notch in the response of the main front channels at the crossover point followed by a slight elevation at 20Hz. <<
>>I didn’t think at the time there would be a downside to this provided the main speakers were capable of handling the bass but the summing of the subwoofers LPF into the main channels causes this undesirable anomaly. I informed Emotiva about my findings and they are working on a firmware fix to address this.<<
What anomaly? Electrically the Enhanced Bass mode is working exactly as designed. The notch only occurs because of Gene’s test setup, feeding the same signal into the LFE and Main channels at the same time. The LFE channel’s LPF phase shift causes the sum to roll through the notch, but with real program content the LFE and main channels are not coherent, so no such notch will ever exist. No matter, he says Emotiva will fix it.
Lastly. Gene writes: >>Further, because the Outlaw 975 has only one DSP, it offers limited functionality with a bitstream above a 48kHz sampling rate via HDMI. You will have to switch your Blu-ray player to PCM and engage its internal bass management and digital speaker delays as a workaround if you go the Outlaw route.<< This obviously wrong on two counts. First, no BD players offer bass management or speaker delays in the HDMI output. How does he not know that? Second, you can feed any signal into the 975 and it will have exactly the same bass management and surround processing functionality with high sample rate sources as it does with 48 kHz sources. Perhaps Gene should test a 975 before reporting on how he thinks it works.
