Emotiva has three 5 channel amps, and the one I'm proposing would fit in well between their bottom two lines. The XPA-5 has 200 watts/channel and the UPA-500 has 80 watts/channel (all into 8 Ohms). While I know there are many companies that have amps with numbers similar to what I'm proposing, there aren't many at all in the price range I was suggesting.

While I understand each channel can be configured to run anything, for my setup (and I'm sure many others) the 2 extra channels of the 7125 would never be used. I would think a lot of people would look elsewhere for an amp because they wouldn't see the need for the additional channels. It is nice to have the ability to upgrade later, but for a lot of us, they would just be taking up space. With a new, smaller 5 channel amp, it would take up less space, weigh less, and be able to be integrated better into your setup. Plus, most wives never object to something that is smaller when it comes to our HT gear.

X-Man: I was intrigued by your idea of different amp channels for different speaker channels. I would make the center channel more powerful though as I know it gets a lot of audio information sent to it. The only difficulty I can see with your proposed amp is it might have an even smaller demographic of buyers than my proposed amp. I would think you would have to really spell out what kind of speakers you need for each channel. If you're looking for something like that, I'm surprised you haven't just got a bunch of different sized monoblock amps for your channels. I know space is an issue, but that would be one way of tackling it. I definitely can understand getting some mammoth monoblocks to run some full range front L/R speakers...