Anthem or Emotiva

Between the Marantz and the Anthem, it is a matter of taste and desired sonic signature.  The Anthem is going to have much more resolution, attack and detail.  The Marantz 8802a is an excellently designed platform with a massive main power supply and excellent localized power supply filter around all section of the DAC I/V board.  Individual discrete analog output stages.  However, the Marantz is voiced on the warm side, so it will be much warmer and slower than the Anthem.  You're interpretation could be that the Marantz lacks excitement and slam.  Alternatively, you could favor the Marantz for music because of the warm/thick tones.  The Anthem could be seen as very bright (bordering on harsh) when compared to the Marantz.

For home theater movie excitement, I would choose Anthem over Marantz every time.  However, if you liked the warm thick solid tones of music and horns, the Marantz would be better.

I am assuming you mean the Emotiva XMC-1 (the XPS-1 is a phono preamp).

Based on those two choices, I would go with Anthem AVM-60.  It is going to have much better sound quality and resolution.  Anthem uses a true linear power supply.

Emotiva uses a switching power supply (even though it has a toroidal transformer).  It also uses some rather slow op amps, so sound quality is somewhat closed in and constrained. 

Since Anthem uses its own "ARC" anthem room correction, it does not have to pay licensing fees to Dirac (which does bump up the core cost of the Emotiva).  That is, if you like room correction.