Sure, just keep in mind that this was a few years back so my hardware experience likely has nothing to do with their current hardware. My comment was more about my customer service experience with them.
I had one of their 'reference' five channel amps. It was a big, heavy beast of an amp. IIRC, it put out 600 wpc into 4 ohms with all channels driven. It required a 20 A circuit, weighed about 100# and cost me $2K. I loved that amp and it fit perfectly into my 5.1 home theater setup. If it hadn't had an issue, I might still be running it...
Unfortunately, the amp's protection circuits started kicking in and would shut down the amp. This might happen once a month, or three times an hour. Once it shut down the only way to reset it was to climb behind my equipment rack, switch off the main power, wait, then power the mains back up, and finally bring the amp back online.
Of course this problem started right after the warranty ran out, so I went ahead and contacted their customer service to see what my options were. The first issue was they felt this wasn't an amp problem, but instead was either my cables or my processor. I had already checked all my cabling and physical connections multiple times and everything appeared fine. The challenge was I didn't have a good way to check my processor. I figured my best option was to borrow my neighbor, pull the amp, box it and ship it back for service. Well, it turned out that was NOT an option. IOW, there was no option for the factory to evaluate it or repair it!!!
I guess I didn't think a $2K amp was a disposable item. However, while I was not happy with them, when it came to five channel HT amps their pricing was attractive so I asked them what kind of deal they could give me on a new 5 ch amp?
While most companies try to keep their customers happy, they seemed offended that I would even ask for a discount. Okay, so now I was stuck as I had a problem that I couldn't say with 100% certainty was their amp, but I definitely had an overall system problem. Since I really suspected the amp, and had no way to swap out my processor, I bought their least expensive 5 ch amp figuring I could just use it to test, and return it within their 30 day trial window. I dropped it in my system and sure enough, problem solved. I never sent it back to them though because I wanted to be 100% sure. Instead, I ran it 2-3 months and figured I would just sell it later.
Since I had now proven that it was their amp, I once again tried to see if I could get a good discount on a new amp. While they finally agreed, first they wanted me to take my old amp out into my driveway, and take a sledge hammer to it. Why? So I could shoot a video and send it to them for proof the amp wasn't working. While I understood their request, I told them to just forget it as I didn't like how they handled the whole situation...
Soooo, now I needed a new amp and I used that opportunity to do a big upgrade and moved to a pair of Parasound JC 1 mono blocks and an A31 three channel amp, which was a great overall decision! I am not dogging Emotiva's gear as all electronics eventually fail. I was just really disappointed that I had no way to get my amp repaired, and the overall customer service experience just left a bad taste in my mouth. Hopefully they have cleaned up both areas...
BTW, if you are seriously considering an Emotiva 5 ch amp, I have a very lightly used A-500 amp that has been boxed up and sitting in my 'to sell' pile for a couple years. While I haven't looked at it in years, there shouldn't be a mark on it, and it will have everything the factory originally sent with it. That said, I've also got a lightly used Emotiva ERC-2 CD player and I'd be happy to put a package deal together. I really need to get going and post a bunch of stuff to Audiogon. I've got several Aragon amps, preamps, a NAD processor and several pieces of ML gear (unfortunately, without boxes) I need to move out of here...
