Mcintosh MX 136 or Halcro SSP-200?

The Halcro will accept MC PCM, not sure if the Mac does. I personally would stay away from the 136, friends of min e owned it and had major reliability issues and functional issues.

The Halcro will process up to 7.1 LPCM over HDMI. The McIntosh will not. If you are looking for something to work with Blu-Ray definately pick the Halcro. The new Classe SSP-800 will new process audio over HDMI as well.

I would imagine the McIntosh will show a replacement to the MX-136 in a few months.

I have the MC 136 and no reliability issues. When I bot it I did consider the Halcro...the latter does have a better internal DAC but as an analogue pre amp not as good as MC 136 so depends whether what your aims are in your system. Re HDMI - blu ray again the questions are re video vs audio. For video, Halcro has better upscaling features but I dont need it as my blu ray, dvd player does it anyway so all the MC 136 does is pass thru switch at the end of the day. As always with video the question is whether where u want to the video processing to occur. HDMI audio...well the hi rez formats need HMDI 1.3..MC136 definitely not, Halcro may have updated since I last saw their models which at the time didn't.