Time for a new a/v receiver could use some input!

badaga,
thanks for your info, my room is 17x19 with 15 feet ceiling its also an open floor plan so the room is open on two sides.
I use Merlin vsm mme and a center speaker that Bobby Palkovic made for me a few years ago I want to have enough power because of the openness of the room. thats why I thought the Anthem mrx720 would be better than the 520 for me.

I'm also interested in a new AVR with HDMI 2.0 4K, since my current AVR requires me to run two HDMI cables from my Oppo UHD Blu-ray player, one to the TV and one to the AVR.  

What I'm looking at is the Onkyo TX-RZ920, which is available for $989 from Onkyo.  I found out about it on Audioholics. Before you turn up your nose, this thing is a power house AVR and has excellent DACs in it.  It also allows you to turn off the front L/R and/or Center channels when using a separate power amp for those channels.  Almost all other AVRs continue to run those channels even if you are using the RCA outputs to connect to a separate amp, which causes the distortion to increase in those channels when you turn up the volume and the heat begins to rise.

https://www.onkyousa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TX-RZ920_US_20171027.pdf

I made up my mind and I’m getting the Anthem mrx720.
Is Crutchfield a decent place to buy from? any recommendation as to where to buy it from?
Thanks to all for your thoughts and advice.

Is Crutchfield a decent place to buy from?

Yes. Unless you can support a local brick and mortar audio store.

tesseract86, you’ll never regret your choice. Once in a while Anthem runs a promotion of 20% off on it’s receivers and amps. Typically 2-3 times a year or may be just twice, not sure. Depending on when it was last time you can try to figure out if it’ll happen anytime soon. I guess that’ll be a great way to buy $500 off of MRX-720. Good luck!