Emotiva equipmet, how good is it?

As an XPA Emotiva amp owner(until I sold it off) I have to differ with some of the comments.

 I had the amp paired with a pair of higher end speakers, and it’s weaknesses showed up.  Not very accurate bass, overly bright at higher volumes and this with laid back speakers.  

I was using the XDA-1( what they billed as a dac/digital pre amp) and really both were mediocre.  I will say that although I think their entry level stuff is still mediocre, I can’t speak to their top of the line stuff these days.

but I’d give most of it a pass, look at Schiit Audio for a pre and amp if you want lots of bang for your buck these days.  They are serious audio heads and design their own stuff, and have it built locally from the ground up.

I  had an Emotiva XDA dac.  It was the brightest and thinness sounding piece of crap I ever heard.  You get what you pay for.  The worst were the very bright and ugly led’s. It could burn holes in your eyeballs.  Never again, I got conned

My experience was similar to yours for the XDA-1.  Somewhat thin and bright sounding which made it harsh at higher volumes.  

Emotiva said it had lossless volume when it first came out so I bought it for preamp duties.  But when I auditioned it the volume ramped up so fast from zero to 15(out of 80 steps or so) that it was too loud at this point depending on the music being played.

Emotiva did fix this, by changing the firmware, but then they public ally admitted  that it didn’t have lossless volume, which makes it useless as a pre.  Which is the reason I bought it.   And this is on top of it being bright sounding.

it became clear to me that they didn’t really know what they were doing.   Their flagship 2 channel pre was delayed two or 3 years and with one delay announcement Lonnie said that when paired with the XDA, the soundstage collapsed, so they needed to rework things.  

Either they didn’t have control of the design process, or worse still, they did with the screw ups being directly their fault.

at the end of the day, Dan L. Is a businessman first, making deals and cutting costs.  He doesn’t design anything and pays people mostly in China to design and make whatever at a certain price point.

i prefer Schiit Audio these days because the founders design their own stuff, and obviously know what they are doing.  The dacs, headphone amps and amplifiers all work as intended with no surprises after the fact.  I’d advise the OP to put them on the short list as well.

FYI to the OP, the XDA-2 is long out of production. Their current dac may be better.

LJG, you must understand, when Emotiva was selling the XDA-1, they were calling it a digital preamp, and marketing it as such. Doesn’t that seem just a little wrong headed??  Also, you dismiss Schiit Audio but have obviously not tried more than one or two models or versions of their DACs,  or else you would have at least mentioned one such model.

they currently offer 7 separate models.  The multibit stuff they have is amazing to me.   When I tried the entry level Modi Uber, I immediately realized it was superior to the XDA dac.  So I upgraded to the Bifrost Multibit and the detail it gives with warmth is something Emotiva could never achieve.  Ymmv.