THOUGHTS PLEASE- also emotiva.......?

I’ve had all the above units in one form or another. Can’t speak to this years models. Loved my Onkyo. Gave it to my son. Loved my old Denon and bought a new one for HT. Their top of the line receivers have a very nice sound. I run pre-outs to the front three but the rest are out of the receiver. I prefer Denon or Onkyo. You can always add mono blocks later. Good luck. 

If you’re going to upgrade your speakers soon you should identify which ones you’ll be getting first so you know how much power you’ll need.  As far as electronics forget Emotiva, and if you like the sound of your Onkyo forget Marantz too.  Get an Anthem AVR — it’ll give you what your Onkyo does while improving upon it in pretty much every parameter.  There’s a very nice MRX-510 available on US AudioMart for $599 if you can get by with 100Wpc.  Yes it’s the previous model, but if it has the features you need it’s a great bargain and you can use the balance of funds toward upgrading speakers.  In any event, go with Anthem and you won’t be disappointed.  Best of luck. 

I had two Emotiva boat anchors, sorry I mean power amps, and their latest processor, sorry do not remember the model.
These took up huge amounts of rack and floor space and ran hot!
Replaced both power amps and the processor with tiny little Nuforce 8 channel class D power amp and matching processor.
AVP-18 is the processor, MCA20 is the power amp.

Totally slaughtered the Emotiva stuff in every aspect.
Small form, runs cool, just as flexible as the Emotiva processor was and on paper it is only supposed to be 150wpc x8 but in the room it plays WAY louder than the Emotiva kit ever did.

Only downside of the AVP18 is there are no future upgrades planned for it so Dolby Atmos is not supported if that is important.
I run 7.1 and the few Atmos discs I have come across I have just run whatever regular non Atmos soundtrack it came with as an alternative.