Agreed -- but it also means that they hired the right marketing team for the audience that has adopted the vocal fry! As I point out, good for all of us in making sure streaming sites continue to invest in good mixes as opposed to iPad/iPhone mixes.The vocal fry annoys the crap out of me...
We'll have to wait and see how they measure here at ASR. These have been designed in the post-Arcam at ASR world... so maybe they've adopted the lessons of Schiit and spent a little extra time working on SINAD since it's something that people will see in a search engine. Skipping pre-outs and putting high quality Class D amps is a smart idea for keeping things simpe. The only reason we need pre-outs on a consumer AVR is because other AVRs have poor power supplies. The 16+ channel processors are a different story.The product quality look cheap when looking at the back panel.
$1600 without full pre-out RCA!
I run all active speakers, but's tricky running power *and* signal. I am able to run a lot of stuff off daisy chained PowerCon 20 and Meyer Sound 48V DC 5-wire connectios. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to run a Genelec, Neumann, or JBL 708P setup in a home environment if you wanted to have 12V triggers powering on the speakers and keep things looking tidy. My setup is already pretty messy.