Thought this might interest the people who have speakers for stereo and home theater setups. This is Emotiva's upcoming pre/pro which, as a pre-amp/processor, functions as DAC offering pure stereo, home theater processor doing all the usual lossless surround formats via lots of HDMI inputs, future-proofed for 4K video support and features this TACT dynamic room correction software, which from what I've read is suppose to leave Audessy crying in the corner and is pretty incredible. They also promise future upgrades via software to keep it up to date with the AV world.
As someone who is building some speakers for pure stereo and wants a 5.1 HT set up too, I've been looking at pre/pros for a while given it means I don't need two different boxes for the DAC stage without compromising on audio quality like you do with most 'receviers' which are preamp, process and amp all in one, and tend to ring the sound through various DSP stuff even when playing 2.0 for music. There are a few other pre/pros out there which cost a lot, and one or two for similar money (the Marantz AV7005 for example) but this looks like it's going to be special. Emotiva sell direct as well which means, like XTZ's speakers, you're getting better bang for your buck as there's no retailer involved who makes a cut.
They released the predecessor, the UMC-1 a while back which initially had quite a few quirks which took several software updates over a period of time to fix. I believe this time they've taken as long as they needed to ensure out of the box it 'just works'.
Here's the spec sheet:
http://emotiva.com/xmc1/spec_sheet.pdf
Hypothetically this would be great as it'd mean I could run the (active) speakers I'm making via one set of balanced outs in pure stereo (or maybe 2.1 or 2.2 if I want the boom boom boom for certain music), and then connect the unbalanced to an amp(s) for the passive surround speakers. I believe it can stream FLAC files and stuff like that as well.
WANT!
I know Emotiva are popular for their power amps and a few people on here have other stuff by them, but this looks to be the biggest feather in their cap. :D
$1499, or if you have a UMC-1 you should be able to get it for $900, which would be an incredible deal.
