I had the same feelings for many years with my home theater system. I had a Sony ES Processor for home theater which was fine for movies and even DVD and Laserdisc concerts, but when playing CD's it was muddy and lifeless. I always prefered listening to music on my small system in the other room which was Sony ES 5 disc changer, Adcom 555 preamp and 454 amp. I was always disappointed that my bigger room with better equipment sounded so lame when it came to music. When I was auditioning speakers at several shops, I realized how much difference a decent preamp and CD player made to the clarity and detail of the sound so I looked around and bit and bought the Adcom GFP 750 preamp which has the theater pass-through switch so I could hook up my Sony processor to it, and pass it through to the power amp, or when listening to CD's, the signal path was CD player to preamp to power amp. It was an easy way to integrate a preamp with the home theater stuff. It made such a huge difference that it set me on the path to more upgrades. Before with the muddy sound of the Sony it was hard to tell any difference between different DAC's or cables or speakers - it was making everything sound bad. Once I got a better source for music, everything was so much more revealing that I could enjoy my big system again.
I don't know if many other preamps have a good way to pass through the R/L channels of a theater processor which bypass the volume control on the preamp like the Adcom does - maybe someone else knows of some. It is a very nice and convenient feature - you don't want to have to reconnect cables certainly, or have your R/L as an input to the preamp in which case you would have two volume controls for while using the home theater equipment.
In any case, a decent analog preamp/power amp combo makes a huge difference over a receiver or processor stuffed with ton of DSP and other digital enhancement features. If you can find a good way to share the power amp for music and home theater it works out to be a good compromise in my opinion. When integrating home theater and music you always have the acoustic compromises of having the TV in the center which can hurt the imaging of the speakers a bit, but it can still be a great sounding room for both applications.
Wish you luck on your project.
I don't know if many other preamps have a good way to pass through the R/L channels of a theater processor which bypass the volume control on the preamp like the Adcom does - maybe someone else knows of some. It is a very nice and convenient feature - you don't want to have to reconnect cables certainly, or have your R/L as an input to the preamp in which case you would have two volume controls for while using the home theater equipment.
In any case, a decent analog preamp/power amp combo makes a huge difference over a receiver or processor stuffed with ton of DSP and other digital enhancement features. If you can find a good way to share the power amp for music and home theater it works out to be a good compromise in my opinion. When integrating home theater and music you always have the acoustic compromises of having the TV in the center which can hurt the imaging of the speakers a bit, but it can still be a great sounding room for both applications.
Wish you luck on your project.