testtone, I was in the same boat a few months ago and had some reservations about pulling the trigger on a new 950. I had read complaints similar to the one you posted and was unsure if the 950 would be up to the job. I was running a severely overworked Onkyo 601 in my brand new dedicated ht room and was extremely dissatisfied with the results. I'm running Swans 6.1s up front, a C3 center, and DIY rears built with the matching 6.5 poly mid-bass and tweeters from the 6.1s. When trying to reach levels within -10/-5 of reference the amp was clipping and I feared for my speakers lives. I decided it was time to suck it up and place an order. The 950 arrived the next morning and I spent the majority of the day getting things set up and calibrated. I chose not to go with the 770 amp, as enticing as it was, and instead purchased 5 Crown XLS series pro amps. I'm sure I'll get some mixed responses on that one, but I spent less on those amps than I would for an Outlaw, or any other consumer amp out there. I'm running two 202s for surrounds and rear surounds, a 402 for the center, a 602 on the mains, and a 602 bridged for the sub. I can't even begin to tell you how pleased I was with the end result. It was complete night and day for me. Suddenly dialouge was clear, effects were audible that I never knew were there, dynamics, impact, it was all there. I will of course attribute a lot of these improvements to the fact that I now had massive amounts of headroom thanks to the Crowns, but I would have to assume that the 770 or 755 would yield the same results. The 950 was about as easy to use as anything I've ever set up. It's a very straightforward, no frills piece of gear. You get what you get and that's it. But what you get is great sound and flexibility without the useless bells and whistles. I'm the kind of guy who likes to tinker and fine tune my system. I don't need auto room calibration or a ton of DSP settings that I'll never use. I like my gear to be user friendly and that's what the 950 is. There have been only two issues I've had, and they're trivial at best. First off, it takes a second or two to lock on to the audio format (DD,DTS) when a movie spins up. Not a big issue for me, but a minor annoyance when jumping to a scene in the middle of a movie. The second issue was having only two component inputs necessitated an outboard switchbox. Again, not a big deal for me, and not too many people need 5 component inputs. Beyond those two things the 950 has done everything I've expected it to do, and I've been more than pleased with the results. It's been said many times before, but to get this level of performance from another pre/pro, I'd need to pay 2,3,4 times as much as I did. Not worth it in my opinion. Pull the trigger, you won't be sorry.