Welcome to Outlaw Gary. You will truly enjoy home theatre with the new awesome additions to your family. I myself am a 7500 owner and will soon pull the Outlaw trigger on a pair of 2200s to complete the heist. For a pre/pro I am using my Onkyo AVR which works fine (and presently runs my surround backs) but the HDMI board was fried as Onkyo has a problem with that. I am running it on analog 7.1 which gives me lossless audio but takes out any equalization. This still sounds great.

I am toying between the Marantz 7005 or wait for Outlaw engineers to go for a C-section and get the 978 out.

The 7500/7700s have no problem in driving the speakers with both speed and force. Detail is above any AVR can push out and noise is dead silent. I'm sure it must be even better with the exquisite Marantz. Are you running standard interconnects between the new siblings or are you going balanced?