excellent tutorial gonk. well done. i'm pretty famiar wit hthe formats. but it still eludes me as to what the most effect 950 setup/defaults should be for the cable box and dvd player. i have a note paper taped to my entertainement that wife/kids complain about - to comple. i kind of miss my previous acurus act-3 because it allways seemed to know what processing mode to use automatically. can the 950 be programmed to operate more automatically?

i apolologize to poffypoffa once again for hijacking this thread with stupid questions...

The best arrangement is going to depend on personal taste. I'll offer an example, though - the arrangement that I used when I had a 950 (which happened to be an arrangement that worked well with the 950's surround mode memory). The cable box used Pro Logic II-Cinema processing with Cirrus Extra Surround (since I have surround back speakers) when using analog, PCM stereo, and Dolby Digital 2.0 signals. This gave me effective surround, with the exception of sources that were too flat for anything except 5/7 Stereo to do anything with. DVD's (including the DVD recorder) applied Pro Logic II and CES to Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtracks, CES to Dolby Digital 5.1, and CES to DTS 5.1 while DTS-ES and flagged Dolby EX got their respective processing modes. CD's went with pure stereo. The 950 can "learn" your patterns because it has a memory for each input that remembers the processing mode you selected the last time you had that signal type.