To my ears PLIIx is a major stepup from PLII. Of course you have to have a 7.1 speaker system to use PLIIx and that probably makes up part of the difference. I recently made a comparasion of 950 CES vs PLIIx and again to my ears, PLIIx is the winner. I would not use PLIIx as my only reason to upgrade, however I will upgrade to the 990 to get PLIIx, DVI switching, Phono and Auto setup.