Ever wonder how many DA/AD steps, pre-amps and processors a sound track goes through before it reaches your ears? I don't like the extra digital conversions either but I am less than certain that they make a real world difference if done well. Same for up-sampling. In some cases users report unreal gains, while in others they report no difference.

What could be wrong with sending bitstreams to a processor which contains digital crossovers, phase compensation, inter-driver delay adjustment, and room equalization which is then output to each driver of each speaker where it is converted only once? Maybe even feeding a true digital amp. Nirvanna if you believe in digital processing. The sound of death I suppose for a vinyl record and tubeamp-phile.

But this is off thread and doesn't help Juan make a decision. Let's try another thought. There are lots of happy satisfied 990 users out there. Thus they have a good resale value. They also have a 30-day money back guarantee. How can you lose?

You can set your CD player up on two different inputs and set one for your CD-players analog out and one for the digital out. See if you can tell the difference and which DA is better. On my system the 990 decodes digital just about the same as my Denon 3910. I would be hard-pressed to tell you which I liked better. Thus I have no problem with 7.1 analog input for a while even if I believe like obie_fl that a purely digital data stream with the fewest possible DA/AD/DA conversions should give the most pristine reproduction.