short version, i "love" my xmc-2 so much that i just ordered a denon 8500HA, the day the 8500 arrives the xmc will go on craigslist, i was about to pull the trigger on the monoprice htp1, but the similarities to the xmc2 has me worried that its another unfinished product
long story.:
i was so happy last xmas when the wife got me an xmc-2 and xpa 11 channel amp, things quickly changed though.
im used to pulling my new toy out of the box and just use it, but the xmc-2 had me waiting almost 2 weeks before dirac was registered and ready to use
i hate this thing so much, its glitchy, its slow, it makes nasty noises when mp3, flac ets changes sampling and or bitrate, god forbid your a little too fast on the humongous remote, and you might just crash it....sometimes theres sound from the tv (ARC) sometimes theres not, sometimes there will be brief sound and then it will go away.....sometimes the tv cant find the amp....result is minutes spent switching input in hopes of not having to crawl on all fours to turn it off, wait 30+ seconds to turn on and then another 2 minutes for it to boot.....
kids and wife are so tired of it, that they just go straight to internal tv speaker (lg cx) if they get no sound, or go to the den and just watch on the crappy vizio and pioneer 503, all of which works every single time. for a while i had the 503 in the movie room as i tried to figure out what was going on, but the pioneer worked great, no issues what so ever...it even calibrated just fine using the XPA amp to drive the 3 fronts freeing up some height channels
i have had many surround receivers through the years (pioneer, onkyo, nad, sony and yamaha) all have worked great, and only got upgraded cause a new codec like atmos came out....i figured the emotiva would be an ok bet, its has the number "2" in its name so most gremlins must have been figured out right ? i saw their forums and theres a lot of activity which i thought was great. so i took a chance bought tons of XLR cables, and other goodies to get it up and running....
customer service is fast to point you to their forums, which on the surface sounds like a good thing. until you realize theres thousands of pages, if you ask a question, it gets moved to one of the hundred pages longs threads. have fun spending endless hours sifting through endless threads that in the end might get you no where or you will be barked at for asking a question that was already dealt with on page 233 out of 400 pages. god forbid you complain or bring awareness to an issue, those posts might just vanish, or the fanbois will come after you (usually telling you that just how it is and all the other brands have issues too)
the Dirac calibration, omg it had me frothing around the mouth....after hours of trying to get the software to find the amp, it finally happened and i could run my first calibration. it took about 45 minutes to through all speakers, and then the amp or raberrypi they use froze, amp had crashed, and a minute later Dirac on the pc crashed and or stopped responding. Finally after spending most of the day trying to get it all done it turns out the amp+rasberrypi has to be freshly rebooted and has to have been off for 30+ seconds for the ethernet to be truly reset, so a quick off wait 5-10 secs like with a pc is a no go......i have tried many calibrations, but my initial manual calibration with db meter and measuring tape still sounds better.
im afraid im going to damage my speakers one day when i loud listen to music and the amp inserts one of it pops/crackles etc
so here i am, i gave the xmc-2 and emotiva a year to see if they could fix/improve their product...but they have not....