Cary cinema 11a or Krell HTS 7.1 ???

I replaced a Proceed PAV/PDSD with a Cinema 11a, based on Michael Fremer's glowing review of its sonics, and his conclusion that a separate pre-amp would be superfluous. From reviews, I gathered that the sonics of the Cary were superior to those of the Krell. The Cinema 11a and 12 are buggy, but the sonics are indeed superb, and the bugs mostly haven't bothered me. The one bug that does, the 11a and 12 treat LPCM as DSD and thus provide no bass management, is not an issue if you are using analog out from the BDP-95, because the Oppo passes bass management to the Cary.

db

DB - If the Oppo passes bass management to the Cary, then is the Cary converting the analog to digital first, and then back to analog? If so, wouldn't it be better to go digital out from the Oppo?

Mateored,

My post wasn't clear. The Oppo can pass 7.1 analog to the Cary. If the Cary is set to bypass, the 7.1 is output from the Cary without further processing other than RCA being converted to XLR. What I should have written was that the Oppo does the bass management and can process lossless codecs.

In retrospect, I needn't have replaced the PAV/PDSD, because the PDSD has 5.1 analog pass-through and the Oppo can output lossless codecs. The PDSD also converts RCA to XLR.

db

I've owned both the Cary 6 and the original Krell HTS 5.1, so you may extrapolate from from my experience, but hands down the Cary was the more musical of the two in 2ch, and a slight edge to the Krell in HT. In fact, Cary makes some of the most musical 2channel processors you can buy.

I've using the Krell HTS 7.1 with an Oppo BDP-95 right now. It does sound amazing.

When I purchased my pre/pro a few years ago, I did listen to the Cary 11a and although it's a very nice sounding pre, I always felt more "engaged" by the Krell. It really comes down to a matter of taste, they are both very good.