In this work, we propose the joint optimization of the automatic gain control (AGC), which works in the remote radio heads (RHHs), and a low-resolution aware (LRA) linear receive filter based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE), which works on the baseband unit (BBU) pool, for large-scale multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with coarsely quantized signals in cloud radio access networks. We develop successive interference cancellation receivers based on the proposed joint AGC and LRA-MMSE (AGC-LRA-MMSE) approach. An analysis of the achievable sum rates is also carried out. Simulations show that the proposed design has better error rates and higher achievable rates than existing techniques.