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My Parasound A21 review and VS Emotiva XPA

l bought the Parasound halo a21 and the differences of improvement in the sound quality are just unreal, it's like too good to be true, before the parasound i had an Emotiva XPA and after listened to the differences btw the emo and the parasound i got to the conclusion that emotiva made my speakers sounded so bad, the sound quality is night and day differences, I'm was shocked!! It's just unbelievable, to give you a better hint of what I'm talking about, the emotiva is a Honda and the Parasound is a mercedez Benz s63 AMG, or Toyota vs Ferrari lol. I can't believe the sound just can get that good.

Emotiva is not High End they not even close to what high end sounds like, they are good products but never can consider high end, but they claim to be high end, for the price you can get a good Mid-fi sound, but they are out of the high end league, that's a true statement. it's not an opinion, It's what it's. when i demo the parasound i put it side by side with 10,000$ and 12,000 dollars amplifiers and the parasound just sounded as good as those super expensive amps.

The emotiva was my first amplifier so that's why i wrote a review on amazon saying that Emotiva was a truly High end Amp with a consumer price tag LOL, what the Hell i was thinking OMG i was soooooo wrong.

I was only getting 20% of my sonus faber veneres with the emotiva, now I believe I'm getting their full potential 100%, I believed the hype of the emotiva for a while, I was a believer but now i know emotiva is just a good mid-fi amp, nothing more!! If you looking for the best sound as possible please don't get the emotiva, emotiva is not even close to high end, you will be disappointed!! The parasound is the best AMP you can get for the money, i believe that you can spent the double of the money and won't get this kind of performance, Halo is the best Bang for your Buck and i finally found the product that i want to use forever.

to get a better understanding of what i'm talking about, let's say Parasound vs krell is like mercedez benz S Class AMG vs roll royce!!! all depends your budget and how much money you want to spent, but me personally i'm gonna stick with the parasound halo forever.

i use the Cars Example cuz i don't have no words to describe the sound of my system with the halo LOL.

the part that i was even more impressive is with movies, since the Denon X4000 receiver is running the center and surrounds i didn't expect so much differences in the sound quality in the Movie department, but the movies sound nigh and day differences also, but i still need the halo A51 to finish the full amplification department, i'm gonna save up for the A51 cuz i want the same sound quality in the surrounds and center channel, but for now i'm so happy with the performance and soundstage i got from the A21.

I'm very very happy cuz this past saturday i went to the high end show and they were demo the Devialet amps that sounded so good, but the parasound sounds better to me, i can't believe i can get 20,000 dollars performance for 2,500$, THIS IS TO GOOD TO BE TRUE!!! but it's true.
brownsugar_ny
runnin
397 posts
 
Yioyos, you state that it is not fair to compare the Emotiva amps with brands costing several times the cost. But then your supporting argument seems to support the idea that it IS fair to compare. Perhaps I am missing something?

At any rate, I agree with the idea that since Emotiva themselves state that their gear is as good as the much more expensive stuff, that it is fair to compare. And Emotiva's gear does not measure up. Their processors have been buggy, clunky and several years behind the feature set of a $600-700 receiver. The first 2 generations of their DAC and CD player units had various weaknesses and bugs/issues that would have made a third generation off the table had it been any other manufacturer.

Their attempts at subwoofers were likewise weak offerings. Frequency response that starts dropping below 50 Hz? My HSU sub is flat down to 20 Hz. Their UPA and XPA amps have smallish power supplies and capacitor banks. They rate these amps at 1% or .1% at rated power. That means they are already climbing into distortion and have less usable headroom than an amp achieving rated power at .01%. My point here is, it's much cheaper to make an amp with the above specifications as Emotiva does. And it shows up in sound quality.

The XPR amps may be better, that is true. The XPR weighs 102 lbs and has 600 wpc. 99.5% of people don't need 600 watts or even have speakers that can handle 600 watts. But if one does, Emotiva is the only game in town. Just don't pull a muscle trying to get that boat anchor into place!
labtec
189 posts
 
I can't believe people are still wasting time bad mouthing under $1k amps compared with all the snake oil and over-priced products in this hobby.

XPA amps were measured by a third party who does this for a living and doesn't live in the snake oil delusional world that many do. Here is just one of their measurements - http://www.audioholics.com/amplifier-reviews/emotiva-xpa-2/xpa-2-measurements

Like I said before, I use them as low frequency amps on my Wisdom speakers and surrounds in my HT. I can easily afford much more expensive amps, but they measure perfectly fine for these applications and would be more than suitable for any budget audiophile system.

In fact, I could spend $5k on most any tube amp and it would do a worse job controlling the low frequencies.

Of course, I'm sure there will be 1,000 excuses for ignoring measurements and more wasted time claiming that this $800 amp isn't worthy of comparison to $5k amps.

What's worse?

1. A company using normal fluff marketing to hail their products as competitors with more expensive options?

2. A company charging much more for essentially no better product.

I see tons of people bashing Emotiva, but how often do you see anyone bashing this $9500 CDP with the same parts as a $100 CDP - http://homepage1.nifty.com/iberia/column_audio_goldmund-e.htm

What's even more criminal are speakers costing the same as a car, yet not even giving you an active crossover (which is superior to a passive in every way)!

I seriously question the motives of this criticism. Emotiva creates products for almost any budget, with no distributor and dealer markup. They give you a liberal return policy, yet people on hear still like to bash them.

And again for the record, Parasound is another quality company with great value for the money, but, in most cases, it is more than double the cost of Emotiva equivalents.
runnin
397 posts
 
Labtec, Emotiva IS snake oil.

Audioholic's owner has admitted that he's friends with Dan Laufman. I mean, whatever, but the thing is, Audioholics has NEVER had a critical review of an Emotiva product, even the piece of crap UMC-1, when a large percentage of owners of the UMC were having major problems with it. The last Emotiva sub Audioholics reviewed started dropping below 50 Hz. Audioholics called it a best buy when they were critical of the HSU Research sub, VTF-15H, which outperforms the Emo sub in every category. They lost me after that review.

I have a Parasound A21 2 channel amp and compared it side by side with an Emotiva XPA-3 amp. The A21 is in another class, but hey, there's no free lunch.
darkmoebius
900 posts
 
It would help to know what the rest of Brownsugar's system is composed of. What's his preamp and sources, along with cabling? Also, what music he auditions equipment with.

Also, I'm not clear from his review if the Parasound is the second amp he has ever owned. If so, how is this any different than his first rave review of the Emotiva?

Statements like this don't help - "you can get a better performance of what the halo does with other amps, but you would have to spent 10,000 to 12,000 dollars to just get 2 or 5% gain in performance"
ricred1
2,003 posts
 
I own a Parasound A21 and I submit it's very good, not great. It does very little wrong and is on the dark side of neutral to "my ears." There are better/different amps that many may prefer over the Parasound A21. I purchased the A21 because it was within my budget and I like what it does for the money.
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