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Post by DavidR on May 19, 2019 21:25:43 GMT -5
SA = Stealth Amp as it was part of the stealth line. (could also be Sherbourn amp - LOL) It's dead quiet even at full volume - with nothing playing of course.
It was bill as a Studio Reference amp. Limited Edition. From the Owner's manual: Introduction Thank you for purchasing the new Emotiva Stealth SA-250 Studio Reference Power Amplifier. The SA-250 is truly a unique overachiever. The SA-250 offers superb audiophile sound quality, incredible performance, a full complement of professional features, and a cool stealth design aesthetic - and is equally at home in the demanding environment of a professional studio, or driving the critical main channels in a high-end home stereo or home theater system. The SA-250 was designed to be the the flagship amplifier for a new line of super-high-end studio equipment. Although it inherits its short signal path Class A/B architecture from our audiophile equipment, the SA-250 incorporates several circuit refinements and additions that raise its performance to a whole new level. The massively overbuilt power supply allows the SA-250 to drive any real-world speaker load effortlessly and with aplomb; it’s incredibly low distortion and amazingly low noise floor ensure that you’ll hear all the music, with nothing added or subtracted; and its heavy-duty chassis and faceted face plate - machined from a solid 1” slab of aluminum - contribute to its ruggedness and understated good looks. A full compliment of inputs, independent Gain and Ground Lift controls for each channel, and available rack-mount hardware, round out the list of features that make the SA-250 truly exceptional. Happy listening! The Emotiva Team
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novisnick
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Post by novisnick on May 19, 2019 21:30:28 GMT -5
SA = Stealth Amp as it was part of the stealth line. (could also be Sherbourn amp - LOL) It was bill as a Studio Reference amp. Limited Edition. From the Owner's manual: Introduction Thank you for purchasing the new Emotiva Stealth SA-250 Studio Reference Power Amplifier. The SA-250 is truly a unique overachiever. The SA-250 offers superb audiophile sound quality, incredible performance, a full complement of professional features, and a cool stealth design aesthetic - and is equally at home in the demanding environment of a professional studio, or driving the critical main channels in a high-end home stereo or home theater system. The SA-250 was designed to be the the flagship amplifier for a new line of super-high-end studio equipment. Although it inherits its short signal path Class A/B architecture from our audiophile equipment, the SA-250 incorporates several circuit refinements and additions that raise its performance to a whole new level. The massively overbuilt power supply allows the SA-250 to drive any real-world speaker load effortlessly and with aplomb; it’s incredibly low distortion and amazingly low noise floor ensure that you’ll hear all the music, with nothing added or subtracted; and its heavy-duty chassis and faceted face plate - machined from a solid 1” slab of aluminum - contribute to its ruggedness and understated good looks. A full compliment of inputs, independent Gain and Ground Lift controls for each channel, and available rack-mount hardware, round out the list of features that make the SA-250 truly exceptional. Happy listening! The Emotiva Team
Maybe 1% of those that didn’t buy one had actually read the owners manual my friend. Marketing and hype just wasn’t there! Not even enough to give it a try! IMHO Emotiva did NOT differentiate the amp enough / at all.
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Post by monkumonku on May 19, 2019 23:35:44 GMT -5
That sounds really nice... however it simply doesn't always work out that way in real life. Those Bob Carver tube monoblocks were quite nice... And there seemed to be a lot of demand for them... (We were actually planning to continue the original models - and introduce some lower cost models to complement them.) However, as it turned out, the waiting line wasn't all that long, and disappeared rather quickly... And, in the end, we couldn't sell enough to keep paying people to build them...What you're describing is what I was referring to as a "boutique company"... Someone who builds their products, one by one, by hand, in a garage somewhere... And, yes, there was enough market for those Carver tube amps to keep a company like that going... barely... We think companies like that are great... But Emotiva is not one of them... You know what Keith, If Emotiva builds one good product, a high end amplifier for example, cost is no barrier, and do not discontinue it in few years, even if you build it at a customer's request, People will be lined up to buy it, and you'll be backlogged for months. Just stop producing and discontinuing stuff....Really, it is annoying for a company, any company. Back in the early days of Emotiva, the turnover was not as high and as rapid as nowadays. Seems to me Emotiva may be loosing it's focus. wanting to do too much and please every budget. You want to please your high end customers ? Make a high end tube amp, design it well, pull all the stops, and mostly stick to it, price it high, many people would still buy it. There's tons of things that people enthusiastically clamor for but what percentage of them actually buy the product? Like I remember when McD first started selling salads because public demand was apparently so high but then hardly anyone bought them. Or you send out invitations for something and people eagerly respond but then a good number don't show up. Or in the For Sale thread, so often the comment is, "Great price! If I didn't already own one, I'd be all over that!!!" Or, "Gee, I can't understand why this is still for sale and it hasn't been snapped up already!!!" Well there must be a reason for that. Talk is cheap. I can certainly understand how based on customer comments a company might undertake to produce a product but then find out that actual sale-wise, it was mainly all talk and no action. So a business decision is made to stop investing in something that is not going to provide a decent return. All products aren't like Field of Dreams in which you build it and they come.
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Post by DavidR on May 20, 2019 8:09:24 GMT -5
Maybe 1% of those that didn’t buy one had actually read the owners manual my friend. Marketing and hype just wasn’t there! Not even enough to give it a try! IMHO Emotiva did NOT differentiate the amp enough / at all. All I did was respond to a post where a member stated Emo should build a high-end amp and people would line up to buy them. They did and the others didn't. I also agree that Marketing was rather flat on it as well as the Podcast that announced the amp.
Not sure I follow your first sentence. What could they have said or printed to make you want to buy one? I understand circuitry and knew in a heartbeat this was very different,
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KeithL
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Post by KeithL on May 20, 2019 9:51:43 GMT -5
Just to be perfectly clear.....
At this point I'm not promising either MQA or Roon.....
However, we've seen enough interest for both that they're "back on the table again"...
Will it also be Roon Ready network player? Great news!!!
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novisnick
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Post by novisnick on May 20, 2019 9:53:10 GMT -5
Maybe 1% of those that didn’t buy one had actually read the owners manual my friend. Marketing and hype just wasn’t there! Not even enough to give it a try! IMHO Emotiva did NOT differentiate the amp enough / at all. All I did was respond to a post where a member stated Emo should build a high-end amp and people would line up to buy them. They did and the others didn't. I also agree that Marketing was rather flat on it as well as the Podcast that announced the amp.
Not sure I follow your first sentence. What could they have said or printed to make you want to buy one? I understand circuitry and knew in a heartbeat this was very different,
No disrespect to you my friend, I’m just carrying forward the thought. I’m not sure what Emotiva could have done to generate more hype but they just didn’t shake this tree when it was introduced! Wish I had more marketing credits under my belt, I’d have better tools to answer many questions I think. I don’t know much about circuitry so that would be of little use to me. I’m learning more every day about everything in life, it takes all day to learn bery little at my age! LOL
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novisnick
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Post by novisnick on May 20, 2019 9:56:10 GMT -5
Just to be perfectly clear.....
At this point I'm not promising either MQA or Roon.....
However, we've seen enough interest for both that they're "back on the table again"...
Will it also be Roon Ready network player? Great news!!! The price of entry has been going down over the last year, almost seems like a no brainer to me and many I know. Glad to hear that it’s back on the table at least. I do understand that there is NO promises related to MQA or ROON! Thanks for reconciliation! Open minds can cause open wallets! 😋
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Post by monkumonku on May 20, 2019 10:02:59 GMT -5
Maybe 1% of those that didn’t buy one had actually read the owners manual my friend. Marketing and hype just wasn’t there! Not even enough to give it a try! IMHO Emotiva did NOT differentiate the amp enough / at all. All I did was respond to a post where a member stated Emo should build a high-end amp and people would line up to buy them. They did and the others didn't. I also agree that Marketing was rather flat on it as well as the Podcast that announced the amp.
Not sure I follow your first sentence. What could they have said or printed to make you want to buy one? I understand circuitry and knew in a heartbeat this was very different,
I remember when the SA250 was introduced and at that time as I recall Emo did emphasize the differentiation from other amps. It sounded interesting to me (really tempting) but it cost too much and it wasn't something I needed. But still I kept looking at it just because it was different, and was very interested in hearing what those who had purchased it had to say about it. Sounds like it was a really good amp. Then when they discontinued it, I was wondering why would they do that if it was so good? But Keith answered it when he said it just didn't sell well.
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KeithL
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Post by KeithL on May 20, 2019 10:15:22 GMT -5
Marketing has gotten tricky these days.... especially for certain types of products. The days when you could just buy a whole bunch of TV ads or magazine spots and sell piles of product are gone. There are all sorts of options... which is great... but it also makes it easier to spend a lot of money in the wrong place and get nothing back for it. It's easy to spend a lot of money, produce a great ad, and even get lots of people to read it.... only to find out later that the people who read it aren't the ones who might have bought the product.
It's even trickier when you're trying to reach new customers. Another thing is that audio products are something that only a small percentage of people actually buy.
This means that the methods that work well for things that a lot of people purchase don't work well for audio equipment.
For example, the top two or three large auto insurance companies spend, on average, between $5 and $10 MILLION dollars... EACH WEEK... on TV commercials alone.
(That's on the order of a half a billion dollars a year... each... )
We can only assume that they sell so much insurance, to so many people, that those commercials buy them enough extra sales to justify that cost.
However, it's equally obvious that strategy wouldn't work for us.
Note that, on this forum, all you get to see is a small microcosm of the market - people who already own or are familiar with Emotiva audio products - or, at least, audio products in general.
EVERYONE needs car insurance... but only a much smaller portion of the overall market needs or will buy a high end stereo amplifier.
And the folks who will even consider a high end tube amplifier are a small percentage of that already small percentage.
It's tricky to figure out how to reach the right people.
All I did was respond to a post where a member stated Emo should build a high-end amp and people would line up to buy them. They did and the others didn't. I also agree that Marketing was rather flat on it as well as the Podcast that announced the amp.
Not sure I follow your first sentence. What could they have said or printed to make you want to buy one? I understand circuitry and knew in a heartbeat this was very different,
No disrespect to you my friend, I’m just carrying forward the thought. I’m not sure what Emotiva could have done to generate more hype but they just didn’t shake this tree when it was introduced! Wish I had more marketing credits under my belt, I’d have better tools to answer many questions I think. I don’t know much about circuitry so that would be of little use to me. I’m learning more every day about everything in life, it takes all day to learn bery little at my age! LOL
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Post by tropicallutefisk on May 20, 2019 11:05:48 GMT -5
"It's even trickier when you're trying to reach new customers. Another thing is that audio products are something that only a small percentage of people actually buy. This means that the methods that work well for things that a lot of people purchase don't work well for audio equipment."
I'm amazed at how few people will spend more than a couple hundred dollars on an entire audio system. I have a coworker who was asking me about home theater set ups and wanted a great system that was not crazy expensive. I quickly realized he and I were not calibrated. His desired budget for a receiver and speakers was about $500. He ultimately went to Best Buy and grabbed a theater in a box. I don't remember the brand but he was close to his budget.
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Post by brutiarti on May 20, 2019 11:21:38 GMT -5
I think Emotiva doesn't really have a marketing strategy and product development in sync. For example a receive their promotions emails and stuff but I assume these emails go to people that already bought from emotiva in the past. But in my case there is nothing to be excited about anymore. As a hobbyist our thing is to keep upgrading but Emotiva doesn't have a path to upgrade like schiit does. You can start with a $99 fulla and go all the way to the $850 mjolnir.
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Post by DavidR on May 20, 2019 12:51:14 GMT -5
I remember when the SA250 was introduced and at that time as I recall Emo did emphasize the differentiation from other amps. It sounded interesting to me (really tempting) but it cost too much and it wasn't something I needed. But still I kept looking at it just because it was different, and was very interested in hearing what those who had purchased it had to say about it. Sounds like it was a really good amp. Then when they discontinued it, I was wondering why would they do that if it was so good? But Keith answered it when he said it just didn't sell well. Ricky, when it hit the forum many members were saying it was an under powered XPA-2 and why pay more for less watts. I found it odd that nobody from Emotiva corrected that thought. It wasn't really discontinued as it was a Limited Edition (500 units) and was probably to test the waters for high-end. I'm sure Emotiva found the waters cold. I had an XPA-2 G2 (which was a nice improvement over the modded Carver I was using) and the 250 kicked it's ass to the for sale ads. As soon as that sold I bought another.
Too bad as I was looking forward to high-end gear at reasonable costs for very good performance and excellent SQ.
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klinemj
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Post by klinemj on May 20, 2019 13:14:10 GMT -5
Just to be perfectly clear..... At this point I'm not promising either MQA or Roon..... However, we've seen enough interest for both that they're "back on the table again"...
Will it also be Roon Ready network player? Great news!!! That's a good move. Mark
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Post by monkumonku on May 20, 2019 13:38:50 GMT -5
I remember when the SA250 was introduced and at that time as I recall Emo did emphasize the differentiation from other amps. It sounded interesting to me (really tempting) but it cost too much and it wasn't something I needed. But still I kept looking at it just because it was different, and was very interested in hearing what those who had purchased it had to say about it. Sounds like it was a really good amp. Then when they discontinued it, I was wondering why would they do that if it was so good? But Keith answered it when he said it just didn't sell well. Ricky, when it hit the forum many members were saying it was an under powered XPA-2 and why pay more for less watts. I found it odd that nobody from Emotiva corrected that thought. It wasn't really discontinued as it was a Limited Edition (500 units) and was probably to test the waters for high-end. I'm sure Emotiva found the waters cold. I had an XPA-2 G2 (which was a nice improvement over the modded Carver I was using) and the 250 kicked it's ass to the for sale ads. As soon as that sold I bought another.
Too bad as I was looking forward to high-end gear at reasonable costs for very good performance and excellent SQ.
I sort of recall that comparison to the XPA-2 being made but as I recall, there was stuff posted in the Lounge by Emo as to what made the SA250 good. My memory is fuzzy so I could very well be off on that. But I do remember reading everything Emo had said about it because I was curious as to what set it apart, given the XPA-2 was a proven model. I would hope people who spend that kind of money on an amp would do their due diligence in investigating the product, so while Emo may not have done extensive marketing, they did make the amp known and provided the information about it. As an aside, you know what I hate? Places that sell wine and their main way of marketing is to announce how many "points" it received (on a scale of 100). Plenty of people buy a wine based solely on that, without regards to who awarded those points or even what kind of wine it is. They just buy the points. Hey, maybe audio reviewers should rate based on points so that manufacturers can flood your inbox with how many points the equipment received! And that's all you really need to know (I know it really isn't, but for many that's all they care about in the wine world).
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Post by Gary Cook on May 20, 2019 16:01:41 GMT -5
I didn’t buy an SA250 because it was a stereo amp and I wanted mono blocks, which I now have. A stereo amp of any quality or price was simply not on my list because I wanted the amps next to speakers, using long balanced interconnects and short speaker cables.
Cheers Gary
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