Unfortunately, the misses gave me the ever longer face and the evil eye because of "thàt big box" still sitting on "her" living room table. So it's the end of the test period for now. Wait until she finds out about the price... Me mentioning it will last decades while her nails and hair need monthly maintenance will not help at all.
I listened for a lot of the time, since it was very warm the last few days and we only have airco in the living room, where the testing facilities were ;D
The Rothwell XLR inline passive attenuators were in place since I tried them on. They made the XLR pump 10 dB more using it's own limitless power. So bass heavy music at louder volume did make the LED's dance up to level 3 or 4. Neat! What the attenuators do IMO is enhance the bass a bit, but maybe reduce the highs a little bit. All in all, I liked the result.
The XPR-5 also does not produce the very faint transformator hum that my XPA-1's have during the first minute or so when not playing music. Maybe another nice side effect of the "normal" 29 dB gain vs the XPA's 32 dB.
An amp with the resolving power of the XPR-5 will be brutally honoust about the quality of the recording of the music. As long as you hook up matching speakers ofcourse. As always, the electronics only play a secundary role in the music reproduction. Next to the recording and the speakers, also the room is very important as it interacts with the speakers. Our current house (as our new build) is made of wood. Walls are single layer drywall with some rock wool in between. Floor is Oak all around. The right Jamo is very close to a brickwall that envelops the fireplace. That's not ideal but it's only until the new house is done where the Jamo's will get a very big space to fill. The XPR-5 will be used in the multifunctional HT, which is also large being 5,000 cubic feet.
What an amp like the XPR-5 does is assure you that all that could be done amp-wise is fullfilled. The power and the control are sky high and very expensive speakers will benefit from the quality. We were watching a "Later with Jools" broadcast on ZDF (German) from our sat tonight. For those who do not know it: it's a weekly show from BBC with cherry picked artists of various pop-rock-soul-world-jazz-blues genres each do a few tracks live and each in turn. Bjork performed a song "Cosmogony" from her album Biophilia. It starts with very low frequency electronics. This was on the B&W 5.1 in my sig. The sub made itself very noticable. After this, I turned to the XPR-5 + Jamo set since I have another life version of this album (ie, "Biophilia live") in 16/44 AIFF on the attached Mac. I opened the volume, but the bass was much more in control, despite the music being a lot louder. On the B&W 5.1, powered by a Yamaha AVR, the sound quality was good, very good, except for the to heavy lows. But when played on the reference set, a whole other level was reached! reminded me of the time (2010?) we went to a Grace Jones gig indoor. It was extremely loud en somewhat distorted and not always enjoyable because of that. While the CD sounded very good at home.
I am convinced the XPR-5 will sound the same as the XPA-1 in all real world circumstances. If I ever need to replace the XPA-1's (can't think why though), I would get the XPR-2.
Since I am a firm believer (unlike Dan Laufman) in more + better speakers = better movie experience, I will probably get the upcoming 11.2 Marantz AV8801 pre-pro for the XPR-5. The other amps might very well be three humble but honoustly powered UPA-200. There are exciting multi-surround formats being developed behind the horizon, like Auro-3D and Dolby Atmos. Bring them on!!
To finish, I want to point to a sobering article focussing on the aspects of 24/192 music. These people seem the ones behind the Vorbis audio codec, so not 100% unbiassed. Learnsome nonetheless:
people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.htmlIn the end, the author is mentioning "Ambisonics". I never heard of it, but it's smart Brittish surround system dating from 1972 or so. With Height! What's new, huh?