After months and months of research I finally decided to commit and purchase the 990/7125 and LFM-1 Plus for $2400. Now I just discovered Emotiva of which they have their Ultra package for $899 or Reference package for $1499. Has anyone heard these? At $1900 the 990/7125 is quite a bit more. If the quality of build and sound is really that much better than I'll stick with my first impulse and go with Outlaw. Any feedback would be appreciated.

pavlo11: welcome to the forum.

You can find some quick info looking at a couple current specific threads that are in this 990 section. My take, Emotiva is very good, Outlaw is better. How much better is subjective.

Obviously, the crowd around here is going to be more likely to prefer Outlaw over Emotiva because we're in a forum hosted by Outlaw. Having said that, I will say that I really like my 990 I can heartily recommend it.

I've been involved off and on in a lengthy and still ongoing debate about the Ultra package for over a year now - the LMC-1 has a number of bugs that I'd classify as significant (see this post at AV123 for a list of bugs and questions that remain unresolved) and it's not clear whether or not future firmware updates (which I hope will be pursued by Emotiva) could all be installed without being shipped back to Emotiva. The feature set is very minimal, the Pro Logic II/IIx implementation includes some odd bass management compromises and there's not really any surround mode memory (not in a practical manner, at least). There was also the matter of some very confusing discussion of a DTS-ES bug during which Emotiva misunderstood the DTS standards and for at least a couple weeks told customers that they were in the right while all the other receivers and processors were doing DTS-ES/NEO:6 wrong. (Fortunately they realized their mistake eventually, but it was a bit disturbing for it to be an issue in the first place.) I'd be very leery of recommending the LMC-1.

The Reference series is a bit more stable looking than the Ultra. The MMC-1 can trace its roots back to the Sunfire Theater Grand IV - it's a mighty fine platform, but the 990 still has a few extra features and offers sound quality that is going to be on par with the MMC. Also, 990/7125 is actually less expensive than the Reference package ($1898 for the 990/7125 vs $2199 for the MMC-1/IPS-1). Outlaw's amps cost a little more than Emotiva amps in some cases because they are built domestically while the Emotiva amps are built in China.

Another thought... Emotiva's been experiencing some problems with their big MPS-1 amp (modules shutting down when driving low impedance loads at high volume). It doesn't appear to be affecting the IPS-1 or LPA-1, but then it didn't crop up in the MPS-1 until just recently and the underlying problem has not been identified yet.

Ah, an MMC-1/LPA-1 combo... I see. That's priced to compete directly with the 970/7125, it looks like.

The MMC-1's sound quality is going to be closer to the 990's than to the 970's (the 970 uses almost identical DAC's to the LMC-1), although feature-wise the MMC-1 and 970 actually compare pretty evenly. The 970 still has more flexible digital inputs than the MMC-1 (its digital inputs are linked to specific inputs, while Outlaw has always used fully addressable digital inputs) as well as bass management for the 7.1 Direct input, and of course both the 970 and 990 offer universal remotes (the MMC-1's remote only controls the MMC-1).

The LPA-1's first five channels would compare pretty nicely to the 7125 (the last two channels are only 50W each unless bridged to create a single channel). The LPA-1 costs less than the 7125 at least in part because of where it's built. The LPA-1 is manufactured in Asia (China, I believe) while the 7125 is manufactured in the US (California, to be exact). The 7125 also uses a toroidal transformer, which does not appear to be the case for the LPA-1 (at least based on this view ).

The MMC-1 and DMC-1 are certainly good processors, as they are based on a Sunfire Theater Grand IV platform and a quite capable Motorola DSP chip. Likewise, both of the more established Emotiva amps (the MPS-1 and LPA-1) have elicited plenty of positive feedback, with the only hiccups being some early noise problems in the LPA-1's bridged channels (resolved) and the recent low-impedance load problems in the MPS-1. The IPS-1 is still so new that there's little or no user feedback available yet. Hopefully the MPS-1's low-impedance problems are not an issue with the IPS-1, in which case it has the potential to be a very successful amp.

According to the web page it does have a "massive" toroidal transformer.

I wonder whether Outlaw will respond in some way.

My pictures page has some pictures of examples of toroidal transformers. They're distinctively round (hence "toroidal"). The transformer enclosure in the LPA-1 picture here looks mighty rectangular. Why would an enclosure around a toroid be rectangular?
Or is the situation that Emotiva is responding to Outlaw? Possibly because of the ongoing problems with the LMC-1?

Good question. Dunno. Again, the Emotiva's web page says it is toroidal. I didn't mean to suggest that I personally knew one way or another.

Don't know what prompted that package pricing, but that's probably a good one. But what I meant by my comment was I was hoping that Outlaw might do a price drop. Nothing more than wishful thinking, I guess.

Frankly, that whole LMC-1 business totally turned me off from Emotiva, and not even the 40% upgrade offer could bring me to even think about them. And if you read that LMC-1 Issues thread closely, it doesn't seem as though the happy owners are really all that happy. All of their compliments on the piece are qualified. They seem like they are prime candidates for upgraditis: if a component just doesn't do all that it was supposed to, you're bound to want to upgrade to something that actually does do/has what you want.

Personally, if I'm going to drop $900 (or more) on this kind of stuff, I want it to last for a good decade. I don't honestly believe I could get that kind of mileage out of the LMC-1 package. And the fact that they claim a toroidal transformer when it may actually be an El transformer also bugs me.

Now that you mention it, that would be cool...