The pure direct feature on AVR's and receivers is there to pacify the audiophile mind. I read an article some years back by a self proclaimed expert that rate the sound quality of AVR's based on the scale of the IC"s in it. The newer it was, the more functionality was combined on large scale chips, the poorer it had to sound. So as technology marches forward sound gets worse and worse because everyone "knows" that discrete circuits always sound better. My experience is the opposite. New AVR's have very powerful DSP engines that sound better than ever and can do really cool stuff. The pure direct mode on my Yamaha AVR says it plays back the selected source with the least amount of circuitry. I assume that means analog sources stay analog all the way through instead of being converted to digital for the DSP room correction and stuff, and digital sources only get D/A converted an also bypass the DSP. I never use it. I paid all that money to use that stuff. If I want pure direct, I turn it off and use something else. Funny that. I had a friend over once listening to some music. The Marantz AVR I had then was on but my amp was being fed by a DAC into a preamp. The AVR wasn't in the circuit at all. The friend asked if it had some sort of pure direct mode we could use. He reads the magazines, that's what your supposed to use. All the reviews say it sounds better. I just smiled. Sure it does, we've bypassed the whole thing.
