Okay - my bud found what he sees as a serious problem with the 990.

He looked at the manual, and there's not a switched outlet available for him to plug in the relay that he uses to turn on his amps. And he doesn't want to keep the stack on 24/7. Is there a way around this?

although i'm still on the outside looking in,and will be for quite awhile,the 990 has triggers(2) to turn on amps,projectors,etc.anything with a trigger input.including equipped power supplies.i'm sure it would be easy enough to set up a new relay,i believe it's 12v,to turn everything on.

This thread may help you out. As painttoad points out, the 12v triggers (one that is active any time the 990 is on and one that can be assigned to specific inputs) provide the switching.

I had a similar problem which I solved this way: Most of the time I just run the TV, the 950 and the M200 with the center channel only for sound. All of the input devices and the M200 run through a Panamax Max 5300. When I turn on the TV the 950 senses that it's needed and turns on the M200 with the 12v DC trigger (TV, DVR and 950 are plugged into the always on circuit). When I want to fire up the whole system I created a RC macro to turn on the 2nd Zone (which I'm not using) and it's 12v DC trigger starts the Panamax 4300 which has the additional amps for 5.1. This also gave me the ability to split the load across two 20A circuits for better power distribution which provided greater sound quality. More info here

I use the Panamax line of products which have worked well in my system.
Panamax Listing PDF