The signal acquisition has to operate the same way because there's no way to know what signal might crop up. The 990's acquisition is generally pretty speedy, though, and so on some discs (those with a little "dead space" at the start of the first track) it's effectively impossible to identify the lag. There may be some dedicated CD players that start a PCM signal before starting the disc, I suppose, but I don't think either of the ones I've used via digital output did.