yes. i listen to it (upsampling) using analog inputs. and it sounds really good.

this has been a long standing debate for many years now.. Some people prefer an optical digital cable, while other say the sturdy build construction of a good coax cable is better.

I've used and continue to use both glass optical and coax cables in my system. Both perform as designed to. They both carry the digital signal from point A to point B equally well.

Thanks, jmacari. That's interesting that the difference between the sound of your 1072 in analog versus digital throught 990's DACs is relatively small and may not be worth the cost of a separate CD player. Man, the $1100 990 might save me $500 or more bucks on a CD player!

Are there any other owners that could compare the analog performance of their cd players to the 990 handling the DAC work?

I've compared my Yamaha DVD-S1500 to the Model 990. I have found that I like using upsample with the digital input to the analog stereo input.

Lot's of good info there. A few followup questions/comments:

1) "Again, we can only get the most from the weakest link along the chain, not just the DAC, nor just the 990, but cable and wires."

Seems like another argument for using digital (no need to invest in expensive interconnects). My $4 optical cable, courtesy ebay, is working just fine. As somebody pointed out, if the bits get there, they get there.

2) "...I listen to it (upsampling) using analog inputs. and it sounds really good."

I too have listened to the 990 in upsample mode, with analog inputs. It does work, and sounds good... but I'm not sure exactly what it is that I'm listening too. Are we doing a A->D conversion, and then "upsampling" that before converting back to analog? Maybe one of the outlaw guys can clue us in a bit more on how this works.

3) "...format in question only allows analog output (which would be the case for SACD and DVD-Audio)."

Is the 5.1 "DVD audio" encoding fundamentally different than that used for 5.1 DVD movies? I get 5.1 sound just fine for movies using the optical cable. And I have a couple dual-disc CD/DVD's that seem to give me 5.1 surround with the optical cable. My primary DVD player doesn't even have 5.1 outputs... I'll admit I'm a little confused about all the different formats out there.

Thanks-

2) When upsampling is engaged with an analog source, my understanding is that the signal is converted from analog to digital and then upsampled just as would happen with a digital input before conversion back to analog for output.

3) "DVD-Audio" refers to the high-res audio format that competes with SACD - it uses an audio format called MLP (Meridian Lossless Packeting) that provides a lossless audio format. As you've guessed, it is a fundamentally different format than what you're used to with DVD-Video. You need a special player to play back a DVD-A or SACD disc, and those players have to include 5.1 analog outputs because that's the only way most people have for getting access to the MLP audio on a DVD-A. (There are a few ways to get a digital signal out of the player for DVD-A and SACD, but they all took years to get approved for the applications and none have been widely adopted.) DVD-Video (which refers to DVD movies, many concert DVD's, and so forth) uses Dolby Digital with DTS as an option. Both of those formats can pass over a digital audio cable (optical or coaxial) just fine.

Actually, optical interconnects are probably one area where you don't want to cheap out.

Cheap optical cables tend to introduce jitter problems into your system. I've heard this from several different sources that I trust.

As always, your mileage may vary.

If the receiving device cache's and/or re-clocks the bit-stream, jitter shouldn't be an issue... does the 990 do that?

Sound is good enough, that I'm confident my cheap cable isn't dropping data (it's also a short interconnect).

Sorry but I don't undetrstand Gonk's answer 2, "the signal is converted from analog to digital and then upsampled just as would happen with a digital input." Conversion from analog to digital obviously involves sampling. Why wouldn't the ADC sample the analog signal at the highest available sampling rate to begin with, thus making upsampling both unnecessary and impossible?

It's possible that the upsampling takes place as part of the A/D conversion process - as I said, that was just my understanding. I would suspect that the process that upsamples from 44.1/48kHz to 96kHz (or whatever higher sampling rate the 990 generates, I don't recall exactly what it upsamples to) is entirely within the digital domain, though, which is why I assumed the A/D step carried you up to 48kHz under normal circumstances and the upsampling process that is used for digital inputs is then applied identically for the analog signal.