I love the way my 950 sounds, but I do think that the Outlaws seriously dropped the ball on a number of "usability" issues. For one, it should be able to store separate configuration profiles for each input... It is extremely annoying to have to change the volume level when switching from TV to TUNER, or to have to change the sub trim all the time. It would also be nice to be able to set some additional settings per decoding mode, for example have the volume automatically lower by 4dB when going from DD to DTS. These things don't sound terribly "hard" to me; they got the really hard stuff right (the way it sounds) and missed on the easy stuff.

Additionally, any piece of equipment this complex should have discrete IR codes out the wazoo. For all the things they never anticipated you'd want to do, there are always learning remotes to fix the problem, if the discrete codes are there. I simply cannot fathom why there wouldn't be codes for switching surround modes or setting individual speaker trims (if indeed this is the case; I don't have any firsthand knowlege of this).

I hope they do a lot of thinking about this kind of stuff before they release their next pre/pro. Again, I love the way mine sounds, but I find myself spending way too much time futzing with the remote and navigating the OSD menus.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net