I personally believe there is much to be gained from separates. I personally regard receivers as an absolutely horrible concept, and getting worse.
The problem is that electronic solid state deices have a time/heat curve before destruction. It is in all the specs for every solid state device and has to be for the designer. So there is no argument components operating at a higher temperature will have a shorter life. That is not up for debate. The smaller voltage amplifying stages, and especially microprocessors, are especially vulnerable. So essentially it is really bad design to place heat producing power amps, and the more amps you add makes it worse, alongside and in the same case as the small signal voltage amplification stages and even worse to put them in with digital processing circuits.
In addition there is just not enough room to build all those amps with decent sized output devices. In addition I like my power amps to have the output devices tripled and not singles, so six output devices per channel and not two. This makes for much longer life and relaxed reproduction. I can tell you that decent separate power amps sound much better than receiver amps. When using a really well designed power amp versus a receiver the better power amps just really let good speakers come alive. I also favor a unique amp topology which runs cool and gives class A performance with none of the problems. I have used current dumping power amps exclusively since their introduction over forty years ago now.
Lastly a pre pro and multiple power amps enables much more freedom of speaker design with the possibility of a massive increase in performance and realism. I could not power my speakers from a receiver. The design of this system compels the use of separate voltage and power amplification. This 7.1 system is powered by 14 current dumping power amplifier channels.
