Post by fusioneer on Oct 27, 2014 16:17:04 GMT -5
Hi all,
Since there is a dearth of these, I thought I'd create an account and post my Amazon review here. This, in fact, is the second iteration of the review, after a replacement fixed most of my issues. Passages from the previous review are at the bottom, in the interest of completeness. Enjoy!
5/5 stars Sweet, glorious sound, incredible for the price and footprint. Can be a little quirky.
Like most of you readers probably, I was truly excited when I came across this receiver. Finally, something with good power and good pedigree that can fit into a small entertainment center and that doesn't require you to mess with interconnects, triggers, static, ventilation, and all that other questionable audiophile fun. And at a great price to boot.
I'd been running my new and somewhat demanding speakers through a Denon receiver, the largest that could fit, but from the beginning I knew something was missing; no matter what I tried, it just didn't sound good enough. From the moment I hooked up this little guy, I knew I had something special. The Emotiva sounds amazing, it really does. It's hard to describe the difference, but it's as if you had your ears plugged and they're now clear, right in front of the performer. Piano notes and guitar chords have *shape*, and they *linger*, and all of a sudden you look forward to those boring dreamy sequences in movies because there's a good chance an acoustic guitar or violin or sax or raspy voice will pop right into your room and make you grin.
I'd heard something like this in my setup before, but it involved a high end beast of an amplifier / electric heater that I had on loan just to hear what it sounds like. But as an apartment dweller, there was no way that thing was gonna work, so back it went. The Emotiva does all that in half the space, a third of the cabling and a fraction of the cost, and it's relatively cool running to boot.
So that was the (really big) positive. And this is where my review splits personalities, because I had a bunch of criticisms of the first receiver I got (in fact, I almost sent it back). But I ended up having it replaced through Emotiva and to my delighted surprise the new one, with updated firmware, had almost none of these problems. So this review went from three to five stars and I've moved the discussion of the initial problems to the end of the review, where you should probably ignore it.
The remaining quirks are relatively minor. The Fusion doesn't deal well with an HDMI source switching quickly from stereo to Dolby Digital; this comes up when browsing to channels, or when one of those amateur local commercials comes on on an otherwise HD channel. This causes a one second burst of pops and screeches which make me fear for my speakers. However, the workaround that tech support suggested is to run the sound from my satellite box through optical, which works perfectly. So this doesn't bother me anymore.
A flaw in the product that I wouldn't have noticed easily without reading on the Emotiva boards is in the headphone output. The receiver outputs to headphones *after* applying speaker correction. How silly is that? My headphones are not my speakers! A takeaway is to not muck with gain/EQ too much, e.g. the automatic room correction, which I never liked anyway on any receiver. On this one, it's functional but the results not to my liking.
Because I now have a lot more room to talk about the positives, let me mention some that you might not notice easily in the specs.
The Fusion is quite pro in a few aspects, one of which is connectivity and upgrade potential. It has a full set of pre-outs: 7.1 main zone, two 2.0 secondaries, as well as trigger outputs. This means you can easily add more amplification to everything, if need be (although the Fusion's amps can carry you surprisingly far). This is unheard of in this price range, to my knowledge: other manufacturers seem intent on limiting the potential of their mid-range receivers, probably to avoid product cannibalism. Moreover, there are two DACs available, meaning that Zone 2 can output a digital signal (although not HDMI), again unheard of on the lower end.
Another nice touch is having separate channel volume trims on the remote. This helps when you're having trouble hearing speech at night and you want to turn the center channel up. Or the subwoofer down. The trims go away in the morning (i.e. when you power down), as they should.
The last one to mention is the parametric equalizer, again unique in this price range. For the unfamiliar, the PEQ lets you essentially define the EQ bands you need and control their width and decay, which gives far more precise control than a fixed EQ. I'm not enough of a control freak (yet) to truly need it, but again it's there if I change my mind and decide to roll my sleeves and make the room perfect, or (more likely) get someone with sleeves already rolled to do it for me.
Anyway, the bottom line is that this is a great-sounding receiver that probably belongs at twice the price point, if not more. It puts the Denon it replaced to shame. I really hope they sell enough of them to keep the line going, because everyone else seems intent on replacing quality with feature stickers and we really need something like this.
Since this was a long review, here's a summary of the positives and negatives, some of which I've skipped above:
+++ Amazing sound with AVR convenience
+++ Small form factor (but do check the depth, it was close), which makes it a unique product
+++ Cool running, no fan noise, no fire hazard
++ Plenty of power. It would be 110 watts per channel by Marantz quoting standards, far more by others
++ Can drive demanding speakers without sound-altering tricks (see: Denon ECO Mode)
++ Excellent upgrade potential, unique in this price range: full pre-outs and control triggers
++ Separate channel trims, for center channel in particular to hear speech
++ Works well with Harmony, database already has it. Great IR reception.
++ CEC controls on remote, control is more complete than most (for those TV sticks and non-IR remotes)
++ Top notch customer service and warranty. Good fellow user support on the Emotiva board
+ Flexible assignment of inputs, although HDMI sound can only be used with HDMI video
+ High quality Bluetooth (apt-X), fairly unique among AVRs. The playing device has to be fairly new for this.
-- Quirky sound stages, in the case of headphones wrong by any definition
-- No network features. Only firmware update is missed here, because the USB update looks a little scary
- Dolby PL2 does not work for 3.0 or 3.1 setups, only 5.1 and up
- Blue display that can't be turned off or made temporary
- No legacy video, only HDMI
- Steep drops in price raise questions about product future. Yes, $450 is too little for what you get and I'm worried
This little guy is a keeper and after the replacement I couldn't be happier.
Previous review text, for the record:
Problem is, the more time you spend with this thing, the more you realize it's not a consumer device like the Denon, but more like a capricious artist working as a barista. Once you enlist it for TV duties, the fits begin.
First, there are the clicks, pops and drops. The Fusion has a muting circuit that makes the speakers pop a little, which wouldn't be a big deal but it's very happy to engage it whenever you do anything, really; compounding this is a relatively slow resync with the audio stream. Change the channel -- a pop and a few seconds of silence. Rewind or skip -- same. If you run your music through SPDIF, you get this between songs. LET ME REPEAT THIS BECAUSE IT'S A BIG DEAL -- if your setup for music is digital optical or coaxial, it will likely drive you mad. Fortunately, my main one is HDMI so I can live with it.
The pop/resync issue has one really horrible instance, though -- it's when the satellite sound through HDMI changes from stereo to digital, e.g. SD channel change to HD channel. Then it's not just a pop, but a LOUD SCREECH that makes me afraid for my ears & speakers. It's really bad, and it also happens when one of those amateurish local commercials run on an HD channel (yay election season!). This alone almost made me send it back. But I called customer support and they gave me a workaround: run satellite sound separately through SPDIF, which cures the "screeches", although the little pops and pauses are as frequent as ever. They also said the pauses on sound format change can go away if I set the output from the satellite box to stereo and have the Fusion decode it back with ProLogic -- but this doesn't work for me as the satellite box does not output ProLogic and I lose that all-important center channel.
The other problem I have is my beloved Chromecast. Switching to it, which I do fairly frequently, is a slow and painful affair: a blank screen, blue screen, black again, blue again, then finally 6-7 seconds later I'm switched. Very aggravating, particularly in a dark room at night, and so much for "fast HDMI switching". Actually I do think the box can switch fast, because if configure the input to use optical rather than HDMI sound, it's a subsecond switch with no blinking. It's just that with HDMI sound, something goes horribly wrong.
So what we have here is a HDMI receiver that doesn't do HDMI very well. Like so often in this brave new HDMI world, if you talk to customer support they tell you it's the other guy's fault. The satellite box, the Chromecast, the TV box, or maybe the combination of them. Or maybe it's CEC or ARC or HDCP or 4K. Or the cables. Thing is, I'm not interested in these excuses. What I do know is that the Denon switches reasonably fast with no blinking and it never pops, never drops the sound. And so did the HK that preceded it. It can be done, e.g. the common sense step of not showing a blue screen until you've truly failed to switch would go a long way.
All of these annoyances add up. After a few days with the receiver, having settled into the sound a bit I was thinking that maybe it's not worth dealing with this stuff after all. I decided to send it back and wait for something better. So I took it out of the setup, put it in the box and wired the Denon in its place. But then something happened -- I turned on the Denon -- that saved this purchase. It was simply impossible to go back to that after the Emotiva, even "until something better comes along". I'd gotten used to the sound and started taking it for granted, but really the difference was night and day. So the Emotiva stays, at least "until something better comes along" in this type of package.
Or, I suppose, until the issues get fixed in an update, but I'm not holding my breath. Almost all seem like they could be easily fixed in software, but when it comes to this boxes the distinction is not what it seems from the outside, e.g. if one of the chips they buy is responsible for all those HDMI bugs, then to Emotiva it's "hardware" and it will never be fixed. For now, I'm willing to live with it for that sweet, liberating sound, because I don't think there's anything else that can do it in my setup.
So why just three stars then, if the sound is so good and the product unique? Well, if it was *this close* to earning a trip back to FedEx, that ain't a four star product. I also wanted to highlight a few things that might literally drive you mad if you buy this thing and have the wrong kind of setup. And I also secretly wish Emotiva sees this, realize that it's very hard to forgive some of the bugs, and if they fixed this thing or put out an updated Fusion at double the price even, they could really have a hit on their hands, with either amateur or repenting "audiophiles" who just want good sound without the lifestyle.
-- Clicks, pops, drops, screeches on changing sound format or pauses
-- Long, blinking HDMI switch to certain inputs
