Home Theater or Two Chanel sound Quality ?

Zroland, Sorry I didnt respond to your email directly yesterday, I had a ton to do, the vines needed netting bad!!! That email is at home but I believe you wanted to know a few 2 channel Preamps that have a theatre/cinema bypass.

I have been eyeing the Pass Labs X2.5 for myself. BAT, Audio Research, Rogue, and Cary (SLP2002) are a few of the makers of preamps I know have HT/Cinema Bypass feature.

Retrospectively, since HT is second to me, I wish I had taken this path (dedicated preamp with a preserved two channel signal path). From experience, I earnestly think the mid priced processors perform very close to the high-dollar ones when it comes to HT duties. In other words, you can put less of your budget into the processor, so long as it is handling HT duties only.

You can also do a search on "HT bypass" or "unity gain," and find some other alternatives or at the very least some interesting reading.

I agree with Distortion above, I would have done it the same way if I had known what I was doing when I had purchased all my HT stuff several years ago.

If multi-channel music is at all important another decent option would be to get a multi-channal analog preamp like the MAP-1 from McCormack. Then you could perhaps get a high quality universal player that decodes DTS and Dolby Digital to feed the analog signals to the MAP-1.

But again my first choice would be to do as Distortion suggests above, it is what I am doing currently.

Go for McIntosh and never look back.

I choose to build my 2 channel first. My integrated has a HT throughput allowing just the use of the amp section for the front channels.

As far as the DVD I agree with Distortion.

Good luck in your search.

Remember to take the system as a whole.