I had trouble with the XPA-2 nearly 2 years ago, the head of the company or product development (?) was nice, I believe his name was Lonnie, emailed me some suggestions but I never could make it work with the M80s, it kept going into protect mode. I thought the XPA-2 sounded great until it crapped out and there was no sound, which of course was very frustrating. The problem only happened with HT sources with wide dynamic range but would happen frequently with dynamic peaks even at nonreference volumes, I never could make it happen with music even at 105 db, or even higher. Lonnie swore at the time that two XPA-1s, which were just then coming out, would work just fine with the M80s. I decided to punt and went with the A1400-8, never looked back.
Others have had no problem with Emotiva stuff, a few like me succumbed to the Emo jinx, which was largely confined to the M80s.
My guess is that the XPA-1s would most likely work well (although it's funny, if memory serves Lonnie told me that they would drive a 2 ohm load and I thought the wattage at 2 ohm spec was listed on the Emo website, now I see they only give specs for the XPA-1 driving a 4 or 8 ohm load; that could be important because at the time Lonnie kept insisting that the m80s would dip below 4 ohms in certain situations and this would trigger the protect circuit in the XPA-2, even there was no evidence from the M80 frequency response curve on record to support this claim. Lonnie believed that the absence of a protect circuit was what made the XPA-2 so responsive to instantaneous peaks but sadly the poor XPA-2 was no match for the power hungry M80s!).
Emo does or did have a 30 day return policy if you don't mind paying for shipping, which would add up some with 3 XPA-1s. Don't overlook the form factor, though, those suckers are huge, back breakers, and I didn't find the XPA-2 pretty to look at in my HT/living room, but of course such aesthetics are a matter of taste.
Let us know if you try out that setup, it sounds like fun.
