Update:
I was ready to measure the amperage of the pre-out via spectrum analyzer tonight and just my luck, few seconds before I start my measurement my Onkyo TX-NR5008 just decided to die on me (no sound output from any speaker at all). Upon some research, late Onkyo AVR models seem to all to suffer some sort of HDMI board failures due to overheat/cold soldering. I decide to sell this thing once for all (I will bring it to my company lab tomorrow and have my engineers fix this damn thing) and just get a quality preamp with full XLR output instead. So far I am debating what to get,
Marantz AV8801
Yamaha CX-A5000
Denon Professional DN-500AV
Any other suggestion? Thx!
-Howard
