New Products

Emotiva has announced that it's now shipping its new top-of-the-line monoblock amp, the XPR-1. Each $1,499 XPR-1 is rated at 1,000 watts into 8 ohms and 1,750 watts into 4 ohms.

It's a Class H amp, which means that its power supply rails "float" so they deliver only a few volts more than the output signal. This design minimizes excess energy that must be dissipated by the heat sinks, thus there's less heat generated and less power consumed. It's a fully balanced design, meaning that it uses two separate, "mirror-imaged" amp circuits, one for the positive-going half of the signal, one for the negative-going half. The fully balanced design cancels out external interference, doubles the slew rate (the amount of voltage an amp can generate in a microsecond), and expands frequency response (which is rated at 5 Hz to 80 kHz, ±3 dB).

More interesting specs: The XPR-1 uses a 20-amp AC cord, and each one weighs 99 lbs. It has balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA inputs. A built-in LED meter provides VU/peak output level monitoring. And, fortunately, it has circuitry that limits the current inrush when you power it up, thus minimizing the chance that you'll trip your circuit breaker-an especially good idea if you're installing 5 or 7 XPR-1s.