Opinions on sound quality vary a fair bit, but since I haven't heard an LMC-1 I'll leave it to others to discuss. I will toss out that the LMC-1 uses a DAC chip nearly identical to the chip used in the Model 970.
As for problems with the LMC-1, that leads to a very long story. I'll try to briefly run through a few of the historical aspects of the LMC-1's life (at least since it entered production around May 2006) before getting into the current state of affairs.
Originally, the LMC-1 shipped with an implementation of Pro Logic II and IIx that was significantly incomplete - it was unable to apply PLII/IIx to any Dolby Digital bitstream. This generated a great deal of discussion at AVS (including some rather grumpy posts from Roger Dressler of Dolby), and Emotiva eventually agreed to revise the firmware so that PLII/IIx was fully supported. This revision (which went into production last summer) has a side-effect that remains officially undocumented still: the LMC-1's triple crossover is disabled any time PLII or PLIIx is applied to a Dolby Digital signal, and the unit uses the highest of the three crossovers for all small speakers.
In a similar bit of core processing difficulty, the LMC-1's DTS ES Matrix processing (which is typically identified as DTS NEO:6 these days, but is still called ES Matrix on the LMC-1 because of the age of the DSP chip being used) was not able to be applied to a DTS 5.1 source. The really upsetting aspect of that problem was Emotiva's original response when the bug was brought to light back in March. They told at least two customers (one a friend of a gunslinger, another an AV123 forum member) that Emotiva's implementation (which did not allow ES Matrix to be applied to a DTS 5.1 source) was right and that every
other manufacturer was wrong to offer it. (This statement, by the way, was incorrect.) Fortunately, they did fix the bug back in March, although the fix added a new bug in the way the Dolby button on the remote works that is still not entirely fixed (Emotiva has admitted that it still exists when the unit is configured for a 6.1 speaker setup, and I've heard from one person with a late June firmware that it still occurred for a 5.1 speaker setup as well).
The issues that are known or believed to still exist with the LMC-1 are a mix of bugs and unusual design limitations. The list has been reduced in length somewhat, but it's still not insignificant.
- Surround mode memory. The LMC-1 does not have external memory for the DSP chip, and as a result it is not possible to offer per-input surround mode memory. Instead, there are two (maybe three?) surround mode memories. There's one for two-channel sources (be they analog stereo, PCM digital stereo, or Dolby Digital 2.0) and one for multichannel sources (although I've asked if there shouldn't be two memories here since DTS and Dolby Digital would have different surround processing needs). I've asked repeatedly for some sort of logic chart or diagram or something to explain how this memory works, but have not yet seen a definitive and consistant summary. If you want to use stereo mode for CD's and PLIIx for watching TV, you'll need to make close friends with the LMC-1's remote control as you'll be manually selecting the desired surround mode.
- Pro Logic II/IIx Music/Movie/Virtual mode selection. Last year's PLII/IIx fix introduced a bug that causes the LMC-1 to tend to revert to Music mode for PLII/IIx even when users manually select Movie or Virtual in the setup menu. There has been some feedback from Emotiva about this, but it has been related to when PLII/IIx can be used and not how the different modes of PLII/IIx are selected and remembered. I'm not sure if this is fixed or not.
- Dolby EX displays when it shouldn't. This is a bug that I've seen reported several times, including with very recent firmware versions, but which I have had a hard time getting Emotiva to recognize. Basically, the LMC-1 will sometimes engage plain Dolby Digital decoding (I think) while reporting that it is in Dolby EX mode.
- Dolby button bug. In some cases, the Dolby button on the remote will only allow the user to scroll through a few modes before getting "stuck." At that point, you must enter the LMC-1's setup menu to change surround processing modes. This bug appears to be fixed for some speaker setups.
- Speaker distance doubling. There was a bug last year that caused the LMC-1 to double the specified distance to a speaker. It was believed to be fixed, but was recently reported to still happen if using the front panel to set distances.
- Record outputs are not fixed volume. Lonnie at Emotiva and I have a bit of a running disagreement on this one, I think. I classify it as an issue because the level of the analog audio record outputs (Video1 and tape) is affected by the main volume. This was originally not indicated in the manual, although that has been adjusted in the current version available for download from Emotiva's site. I still have not heard a scenario in which this arrangement is useful for the intended purpose of recording the active source.
The LMC-1 originally required a trip back to Tennessee to have firmware updates made, which is one reason that many older LMC-1's have not been updated (many still have the original firmware, with the incomplete PLII/IIx implementation). Back in late March or early April, Emotiva announced a USB interface to allow users to update their own firmware, which will work with any unit shipped after mid-March 2007, but so far that "dongle" and the associated software has not been released yet.
Two other threads that may be worth reading up on are
the latest incarnation of my LMC-1 issue list (now residing in Emotiva's forum after previously living over at AV123's forum for several months) and
my 970/LMC-1 FAQ (which will help identify differences in feature set between the two units).
I'd recommend double-checking your 970's firmware version and talking with Outlaw's tech support before trading the 970 for an LMC-1.
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