OUCH! Please tell me you were just kidding.

For me at least, the whole point of vinyl is it's musical / sonic purity. Dynamic range expanders (not really needed anyway) and click and pop reducers must by their very nature compromise the sound. Analog processing of this type just does not work. Dynamics processors in particular have a horrible time dealing with mixed program material, owing to their one-size-fits-all time constants. For recording, dynamics processing is used all the time, but that is with single instruments, especially vocals, but that's a completely different usage.

And HDMI - are you saying you would want to convert your vinyl analog to digital, then back to analog again before it goes to the power amp? Doesn't that defeat the point?

Vinyl playback offers the most musically direct connection to the original recording artists possible. I sure wouldn't want to muck up that purity with any manner of post processing, especially considering it's not needed.

For the record (pun intended), I would recommend an outboard phono preamp for the highest quality possible from the medium. Also, I would recommend a separate stereo preamplifier for music only listening, with a HT preamp like the 997 feeding it's left and right outputs into one set of inputs of the stereo preamp for movie sound. HT preamps, no matter how good, just cannot match the sonic purity of a dedicated stereo preamp due to the extremely complex and lengthy signal path necessary to accommodate all the HT inputs/outputs/features.