Thanks Dilettante,
Is that one CD or Blu-ray? 2 Channel or surround sound?
Glad the Triton Ones are getting to strut their stuff for you!!!!
Enjoy and God Bless,
Wayne

Wayne - CD - 2 channel! Very similar to Anthem but he has T2s - he has been a BIG help in helping me "tune" the system!

The Symphonies is a 3 CD kit. It contains:
Symphonies 1-3
The Bells
Symphonic Dances
The Isle of the Dead

I'm not a fan of all of this - but my wife loves Rachmaninov so I ordered it (Amazon) for her - put it on this am - perhaps one of the best orchestra recordings I have heard from a recording point of view. I know they are hard to record (so massive volume wise - far ranging notes/sounds) but I have to say - LOTS of detail on this CD. It is on a DECCA label, 1994.

I really like hymn music, easy listening, gospel, and the right kind of jazz - but I have to say - there is a lot of beautiful sound/music in this CD

Got this in the mail Thursday...Charles Mingus / Mingus Ah Um. One of the "50 Greatest Jazz Album's of all Time"...your mileage may vary. What constitutes great jazz...the Piano, the Saxophone, the Trumpet, the Bass, the musicians themselves ? I believe it's a collaboration of all these things that make jazz great. No one style of jazz will please everyone, that's why we have swing, post bop, modern, etc. Give this a listen and see if you enjoy it as much as I do.

Thanks Dilettante for the kind words...you've helped me more than you know.

Listening to Fourplay/Journey (2004) Avalabop.

Andreas Vollenweider - Dancing With The Lion

Never sounded better.

Quickie XMC-1 Update. Excellent hardware. Wonderfully clean. Well built. Nice fit and finish. This is the core of the product and it is a very very good core.

The one thing that would perfect the fit and finish: the blue leds on the buttons and the blue OLED display don't really match. The OLED has more green in it, so there's a clash IMHO. I run it with all the display off anyway, so it's not that big of a deal to me, but for folks that like it all on all the time, they might notice.

Remote - feels like a throw back to the 80's. Not sure much thought was really put into it. Big, heavy, hard to read, no back lighting, nothing in terms of actual human ergonomics. Hard to hold and find the button of interest w/o actually turning on a light and looking at it. And uses some weird type of battery (why??). Pitty given the quality of the device its controlling.

On screen display (OSD). Gets the job done. Nothing flashy but works just fine.

Dirac Live - very promising / high potential, but not ready for prime time IMHO. Mac version of the software very unreliable and only (barely) works on OS-X Mavericks (not Yosemite). Crashes very often (several email vollies with the great Customer support at Emotiva).

However, if you're patient enough to actually get through a measurement and download to the XMC-1 (total time for me to succeed was around 3 hrs over two days!), the correction is mostly excellent. Smooths and enlivens the sound wonderfully. Really pops the upper-mid bass (noticable on bass guitar attack dynamics). I say mostly because the default curve with Dirac Live seems to tromp on the low bass. Listening to this disc and several others with good deep bass dynamics, the depth is highly attenuated. Might be a function of the mic quality that came with the XMC-1.

One great feature of the XMC-1 is it is very easy to do comparison between correction modes and Direct using the mode button on the remote and there is clearly much more attenuation on the very deep bass going on on the default curve. I sprung for the Dirac full version, so at some point I'll play with modifying the correction curve to get more of the deep bass back. I'd say if you're considering the XMC-1, the extra $99 for Dirac full is probably a good bet (but I haven't tried it yet) because the default curve probably needs tweaking (assuming the mac/pc side software runs reliably).

In comparison to my Onkyo with Audysee MultEq32 and my Anthem with Anthem Room Correction (ARC), I'd say that Dirac is significantly more tedious to use (even w/o the crashes, measurement is more nit picky and time consuming). The result, however blows away MultEq32, and is at least as good as ARC (haven't run ARC with my T1s, so can't fairly do apples to apples).

Despite what may sound like negatives, the XMC-1 is a great device. The sonic quality coming through it clearly exceeds anything else I've owned. It does, however, feel like a Version 1.0. Fortunately, I believe the current negatives are mostly minor and are easily fixable to current and future owners. I know from my Emotiva product experience that they'll continue to learn and improve it. I also suspect that their yet to be announced next processor will have learned from this and deliver an even more impressive device.

Brad