Reviews of Receivers (1 Viewer)

I've been doing my research as to what AV receiver and speakers to buy (I'm currently using a basic HTiB), and of course this entails reading as many magazines I can get my hands on, and the reviews on this forum.

many reviews will discuss the ability of a receiver to deal with stereo music, as opposed to movies. for instance, the Marantz SR52000 seems to rate very highly in this department, as compared to the Onkyo 595.

my question: does this refer to the receiver's qualities as an amp only, or as a digital-analog converter (DAC) as well? i.e. would the CD player be hooked up optically/ digitally and the receiver does the conversion as well as amplification before sending the signal to the speakers, or would the CD player perform the conversion and send the analog signal via 2 RCA cables to the receiver for amplification and onwards to the speakers?

this leads to another query: there's often a comment that DVD players make for (relatively) poor CD players. but if it's used solely as a transport, and the digital signal is sent straight to the receiver for conversion, does it make that big a difference?

i've always assumed that they use all of the receiver's "built-in" features: the onboard dd/dts decoder or the onboard DAC.
that would make more sense since the average joe doesn't utilize external decoders. plus, that way, when they do an evaluation of the receiver, they're not "adding" an unknown factor into the test.
but i'm just guessing here. i'm not really sure to be honest...