In Reply to: Blu-ray player analog outputs vs. Pre/pro or Receiver analog outputs. posted by oscar on December 17, 2009 at 16:42:15:
I'd have to say you're making a sensible decision. Even though it's not the direction I chose. Get a BDP with good analog outputs, or at least acceptable ones (I'd put the stock Oppo in the acceptable category).
There is no reason you can't have both an analog and an HDMI pre-pro. Any HDMI pre-pro that you might find acceptable is not exactly cheap, and there's not really that much of a selection that are fully up-to-date (Integra are popular). I do not know if there's any HDMI pre-pro that is also good with analog inputs, and fully up-to-date (difficult for smaller higher-end companies, it seems).
For movies, even a fairly middling HDMI AVR with pre outputs can do an excellent job with a fair implementation of Audyssey. I was very surprised with that. Not nearly as good with music, you'll want the better pre-pro (with better Audyssey implementation) for that most likely.
I like the idea that an HDMI pre-pro allows all the connected devices to use the good centralised analog output circuitry, rather than having the good analog output circuitry distributed in each device. This is more a theoretical for me right now, as it is harder to achieve than I thought. That's the problem when coming from a mostly analog system, big and somewhat costly decisions to be made...at this time I'm giving shorter shrift to my HDMI audio sources, waiting for an HDMI pre-pro that's more to my taste.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Blu-ray player analog outputs vs. Pre/pro or Receiver analog outputs. - cfraser 13:14:04 12/18/09 (0)