Leaderboard

A remote introduces additional contacts and active electronics (if it has a display), which may affect sound quality, so it is obviously better not to use it. The cleaner the path, the better the sound. The clamp filters do not affect sound quality in any way, and are totally useless in a normally working system. Their only function is to prevent the respective cable from becoming a radio noise transmitting antenna in case your computer turns mad and starts outputting radio frequency signals from its USB port. Such things do happen, and may affect entertainment/traffic and equipment control/emergency service radio transmissions in the neighborhood, but the probablity is infinitesimally small.

I've no idea about the Sony receivers as I don't own one. But I recently bought an Onkyo receiver (not MD, just AV receiver with lots of inputs and outputs). It does exactly the same trick. If there's digital on the same input, the digital wins (and the analog cuts out).