I am thinking about pulling the trigger on the new 990 Pre/pro. I currentley use an ICBM between an Adcom GTP 830 and a pair of Adcom amps for bass management due to the Adcoms limited management abilities.

Will the 990 make the ICBM useless? What advantages (other than preserving analog from source to ear) would the ICBM have over, or in conjunction with, the 990? My current system has SACD, DVD-A, DVD, DBS, X-BOX, CD (all analog except X box, DBS and DVD).

Thoughts on using them together? No ICBM?

Here are some of my thoughts...

Pluses for the ICBM: full analog signal path after source for DVD-Audio and SACD, option for stereo subwoofers.

Minuses for the ICBM: must disable time delay in 990 to avoid possible phase problems with ICBM when used between 990 and amps, incompatible with Pro Logic IIx's true 7.1 (single surround back input prevents using PLIIx's stereo surround back output).

At least to my ear (having listened to DVD-Audio and SACD through the 990 and found no audible penalty for the A/D/A bump) and in my case (running only one subwoofer), there's no question that the ICBM isn't needed with a 990. For other people, I would suggest that the minuses (no speaker distance settings allowed, mono surround back) are probably going to outweigh the pluses in most systems.

Thanks for the reply Gonk...one more question.

If the 990's Bass Management is more than adequate, would it be possible to insert the ICBM between the DVD-A SACD player and the 7.1 direct input of the 990 to maintain pure analog (and accept the loss of delay settings) for these sources? That way I could eliminate a DAC process and preserve the analog signal. I would assume I would then set all speakers to large and sub to "on" for this and bypass the player and the 990's bass management functions.

I use would then use a separate DVD player and the bass management of the 990 for movies, digital input from a CD player and the X-Box etc. Here is the rub... Can I have different speaker settings (small, large etc) based on input used? Given the above scenario, would I have to? I might be confused, but I think I would.

It would be possible, but the only way currently available to disable digital bass management on the 7.1 Direct input is to set the speakers to "large" in the 990's speaker configuration menu, which leaves you with no bass management for digital sources. Several of us have suggested that it would be worthwhile to see a way to disable digital bass management of the 7.1 Direct input without setting the speakers to large, but I don't know if it will appear in a firmware revision down the road or not.

Speaking of which, does anyone have any good gossip on when we might see a firmware revision?