Multichannel analog works great but there is more of a learning curve for setting it up properly since it will not use any of the applied receiver settings but use the ones provided by the Blu-ray player. The bass management of most blu-ray players (besides some very expensive ones) have fixed crossovers and limited settings compared to the setup menus in todays receivers.
For ease of use and the best possible features to calibrate your system with your Blu-ray player is a newer receiver that fully supports HDMI.
That said, I do use MC analog with my Panny and it sounds terrific. I do not feel the need to upgrade my receiver.
