Among my challenges for the past 10 years has been a love of home theater as well as stereo and little money to do either well.
Ten years ago I had a Theta Casanova, I went through trying an Onkyo and Emotiva to upgrade/replace it but both were fails. I finally settled on an Oppo 7.1 out BD player with a Parasound stack. P7 + A21 and miniDSP for the center and subwoofer.
That led me to experimenting with Class D monoblocks which I really liked, but to make a long story short, I'm now running a Luxman integrated right next to an Anthem MRX 540 receiver, along with a Mytek DAC. I couldn't be happier.