Is this possible?

[BC Dave]

I was visiting my friend in another city last week and while I was there he picked up a new Panasonic five-disc DVD player that has a built in DD decoder and also a PL II feature. My friend owns a Citation 7.0 preamp (prologic only) and a five channel power amp. We could not figure out how to hook up the Panasonic in a loop to use its onboard DD decoder with the Citation 7.0 prologic preamp and five-channel Acurus power amp he owns. We did manage to get DD sound by directly hooking the DVD player up to the power amp but the sound was ear-piercingly loud and there was no way to change the volume (no gain controls on the power amp). The Citation has a weird connection called "Citation bus" which is some sort of port to future-proof this expensive preamp. Is there any way to hook this up so he can access Dolby Digital from the Panasonic DVD player through the Citation, or does he have to buy a DD/DTS receiver that allows the user to bypass its power amps and hook it directly to his five-channel Acurus power amp? Thanks in advance.

[markw]

If the DVD player does, in fact, have a built in DAC, then it's very possible. What you probably did was to take the 5. analog outputs from the DVD player and fed them directly to the inputs of the power amp. Viola! 5 channel digital sound.

Buy, you probably noticed the lack of any reeamp functions such as volume, etc...

Are yo usure the pre amp does not allow 5.1 analog inputs?

They were all the rage before the industry stabilized on DD/DTS formats and many manufacturer's allowed for the possibility of units like your DVD being fed into them. Many receivers offered this function and I would hope that preamps would haveavailed themselves of this as well.