I got to say friends, I have lost all confidence in Emotiva's engineering department. Yes HDMI, HomeTheater codecs, and all the rest of a AVR's required tasks add up to a very complicated stack of software and hardware, without a doubt IMHO, the hardest to stack to implement well in home audio. But that's not an excuse, AFAIK all the other guys have been fairly successful in bringing their products to market in a reasonably reliable manner.. Over the last 10 years I've owned a super cheapo BOTL Pioneer VSX-822-K reciever plus Marantz 7701 and 7703 pre-pros, none of the 3 have exhibited any real software or hardware failures that made the products troublesome to use. They have all been able to perform there advertised tasks without a major issue.
I don't like to beat up on Emotiva, I have the Emotiva DC-1 DAC that I loaned to Amir 3 years ago to test and it ran for him and me without software issues to comment on. It did have some built shortcomings to talk about but over the last 5 years it's performed for me perfectly both as a DAC, excellent headphone amp, and minimalist 2 channel remote controlled preamp.
I don't know how well Emo's other products have performed on the market but I haven't heard all the complaining on their amps, preamps, etc I have for years now on there HT front ends. It's well past time for them to pull their heads out of their **** and get the HT gear performing before it destroys their entire image..
I don't mean to hurt anyones feelings but this is simply the way I see things, I could in no way ever recommend a Emo HT front end to anyone I liked.
YMMV
Why, Denon-Marantz has offered it for years along with many others? And after years of stagnation it appears to be catching on in the multich music world.
Again why, others don't seem to have any issues bringing it to market this year?
Better get off the pot here too. In the 2 ch world along with the multich, having 2 or more subwoofers has began to be the norm for putting together a smooth deep base response system. For that you'll need DLBC, Audyssey's been doing it for years now.