Ah - I didn't realize that the signal reset when fast forwarding pausing on Tivo. Ouch.

The delay issue with Dish was one of the reasons I finally decided to switch from my 950 to a Lexicon MC-8. I noticed it and reported on it while beta testing the 950. At first the delay occured on a lot of sources (for example, I would lose some DVD digital audio during layer changes and during menu transitions), but Outlaw seems to have conquered everything but the delay on digital video sources like cable and satellite. I wrote about this on my web site. You can get to the exact article by using this link

http://rfowkes.com/html/lexiconmc-81.html

if you don't want to have to navigate my site.

While my Dish network delay (a variety of receivers including a 6000 and a 501 PVR) was long enough to become annoying, it certainly wasn't four seconds. That would drive me out of my mind and would not be acceptable under any circumstances.

Incidentally, this lock-on time seems to be something that most pre/pros deal with when acquiring digital signals. Even the Lexicon has a very minor delay but it is so short that I have never missed any audio as I did with the 950.

And I also concur with you that the 950 sounds beautiful. Once you lock on a signal (not that important except when channel surfing)you can't get better sound for the money.

As was said earlier, I think your Tivo box is contributing to the delay in the way its resetting the signal during fast forward, rewind, etc. I only experience the locking delay when changing from HD to SD channels and vice versa on my HD cable box, and its never more than 2 seconds. I get no delays on my DVD or CD inputs, all of which are connected via optical. IMHO this minor and infrequent annoyance is greatly overshadowed by the sound and performance (and of course price) of the 950.

Well, I've got the new cable box now, and I'm happy to report, all is well. There is occasionally a noticeable, but not annoying delay, which I think may correlate to channels that are PCM, rather than DD. On the flip side, there are occasionally situations when the audio begins before video even shows up!

For those interested, the new cable box is a Motorola DCT6412 Dual-Tuner DVR. I'm pretty happy with it on the whole. The reason I got cable was entirely for the HDTV, which it does very nicely. Compared to Tivo, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but if I never used Tivo, I might think it was pretty good.

One note about Tvio - though I've heard the Tivo may not be standards-friendly with its digital output, I have used it with a few receivers - Sony and Onkyo, specifically - and they had no problems with it. So, while I agree the Tivo may not be cooperating well with the other components, I know that others have managed to work around any idiosyncrasies.

I'm finding the Outlaw/HTM remote pretty liveable, and have programmed the menu navigation buttons for DVD and DVR into the listening mode buttons near the bottom. I still wish there were separate transfer and navigation buttons, but I'm not in a rush to replace it.

Lastly, I just finished watching the extended LOTR trilogy over the last week or so(1 disc per evening), and am as thrilled with the Outlaw's sound as when I first unpacked it. All-in-all, I think it's a great piece of equipment.