I like the 990 as a HT pre/pro fed into my PS Audio GCC-100. I can feed a phono stage or better D/A into the GCC for 2 chan with no compromise.
The 990's D/A with upsampling is pretty nice sounding feeding the GCC-100, and sounds better than my Entec dac when the 990 is in upsampling.
I dont think the 990 on it's own should be considered a high qual 2 chan pre. I do like the balanced out and it sound better I believe than the unbal out.
I have heard a comment on the outlaw forum that one guy thought it was no miracle unit, nice for the price but not a $2000 pre/pro, but who knows how he really evaluated it.
You can't go wrong with the 990 for the price and it performance on the limited quality of highly compressed DVD soundtracks.
(though it did sound better once I got a PS AUdio P500 powerplant - so maybe it's power supply is not as nice as more expensive units)
I say forgo the mods and use the money for a better 2 chan pre (or better yet a no compomise 2chan/5 chan system using a GCC integreated amp) and feed the 990 as one if it's sources. You'll loose very little sound quality by passing the 990 through another pre amp- and loose no quality if feedign through an integrated. BTW I use my 990 volume all the way up at 0db when using it as d/a to get it's volume control as out of the path as possible, and use the GCC's much better sounding volume solution to oad down the signal (GCC vol. has no resitors in it's path)
However for movies I use the GCC in bypass mode (unity gain) for DVD's and use the 990 volume control to adjust volume feeding the 5 chans of amplification.
This approach gets great sounding (and innexpensive) 5.1 decoding and absolute 2 chan performance like I have never heard. Probably a P300 would power a whole system like this, (possibly not running a 3 chan amp on regenerated though) and you'd have anothe huge leap in performance.
Supposedly Powerplants help cheaper componenets even more that expensive ones because that's often where compromised need to be made to get the price point- and the powerplants give the cheaper power supply a perfect signal to start with)
