bbpj:
You might consider the solution I used to get the best of movies and CDs, since my 950 hisses also. Break out that old preamp and put it in line with your left and right front channels. Plug the left and right outputs of the 950 into an aux input of the preamp and your CD player into another input. Then plug the output of this preamp into your power amps for the front left and right channels. Now, you can switch between the 950 for movies and your CD player for playing CDs. Just make a mark on the volume control of the preamp where the volume knob is,so you can return easily to the 'calibrated' level when playing movies. This system works extremely well for me, and sounds better than running my CD player through my 950, and the hiss is gone.

****Warning - Rant follows****

This whole hiss thing is really a stupid issue in a device that supposedly has "24 bit" ADCs and DACs. Do you know how quiet _true_ 24 bit resolution is? Well, it is 144db quiet. That is so quiet that practically no electronic device on the planet Earth can actually be that quiet, barring perhaps liquid nitrogen cooling to near absolute zero degrees. It is so quiet that if you made a recording and set the input level meters to _peak_ at minus 48db, you would _still_ have the entire dynamic range of CD left over. No microphone even comes close to being that quiet. No recording studio could ever be that quiet. And certainly no musicians would be that quiet. If you took a single, low noise transistor and fashoned a simple emmiter follower, it would already be above the noise floor of real 24 bit. The 950 would be dead quiet, even if it had an honest 18 bits of _real_ noise performance. Clearly, it is worse, much worse. In truth, I measured the actual noise of two 950s to be around the level of _12 bit_ performance. There is a major dis-connect here. As marketing departments tout "24 bit performance", they only mislead the consumer - as that claim is just plain false, and unethical. I have noticed a general "dumbing down" of audio starting about the time Home Theatre came to be. Speaker response curves look more like outdoor patio speakers of 20 years ago. And yes, digital electronics that are advertised as holding the promise of being dead quiet, are about as hissy as a half-decent cassette recorder of 20 years ago. Manufacturers used to be much more honest about their specs - products routinely _exceeded_ their specs when tested in reviews. The 950 flunked the noise measurement tests in Sound & Vision Magazine a few months ago. Something is very wrong here....

*****End of Rant****

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited October 19, 2002).]