Thank you Bryan...I normally listen to the a large variety of music (small ensemble classical works, piano, violin and cello works, heavy symphonic classical works, some opera, pipe organ, Japanese, Chinese and Korean Taiko drumming, percussion, brass and wind ensembles, tons of different types of jazz, fusion, R&B, jazz vocals recordings, solo guitar work (Satriani, Stevie Ray Vaughan, etc...) rock, hard rock, prog-rock, new age, electronica and many other types), in short just about everything!
For stereo listening I agree you should definitely try coming out of the player's analog outputs as the DACs are supposed to be quite good in that unit. The one thing you'll want to make of is that whatever receiver you are going into allows for a 'stereo bypass' so that you are not taking analog inputs and then having the receiver digitize them again just put it through its signal path. If that capability does not exist for you or you want to be able to have the receiver post process the input into multi-channel (DTS 6.1 was one of my favorites for playing 2-ch through all my speakers when I had a large HT) then try to find the best sounding receiver with respect to how it handles both HT decoding and post-processing as well as how it handles 2-channel analog input that has to be digitized and then taken back to analog due to the nature of the receiver in question. Let me know what other questions you have and what receivers you are evaluating...have fun!
