Some people love all those cables behind their gear and others prefer the simple HDMI solution, but it really comes down to flexibility and which device (source or AVR) has the best electronics. For instance, I have the model 990 which doesn't support all the new audio codecs but can be fed from my OPPO BDP through the 7.1 analog inputs so it can function in a home theater pretty well with the OPPO doing the decoding. In my current system I use HDMI for simplicity and the processor has better DACs than the OPPO.