You probably cannot find "professional" reviews of Emotiva 'cause they're a direct marketer who's not buying enough ad space to be considered for a positive review...
If you need HDMIs I'm assuming HT use - then I'd consider going w/ a reasonably feature-rich receiver as a pre and maybe Emo XPA-3 as amp (if you're focused on something Emotiva). With luck you can find something like a Yamaha 2065 for ~$900 (saw that at BestBuy last week) that has USB, network, etc. Or an Onkyo, maybe one of the (surprisingly cheap) new Pioneers, etc. - the Emotiva prepro seems to be way too buggy to pin my hopes on at this time (and SQ can be affected by buggy processing).
If you need HDMIs I'm assuming HT use - then I'd consider going w/ a reasonably feature-rich receiver as a pre and maybe Emo XPA-3 as amp (if you're focused on something Emotiva). With luck you can find something like a Yamaha 2065 for ~$900 (saw that at BestBuy last week) that has USB, network, etc. Or an Onkyo, maybe one of the (surprisingly cheap) new Pioneers, etc. - the Emotiva prepro seems to be way too buggy to pin my hopes on at this time (and SQ can be affected by buggy processing).