Kevin:
Have you heard anything more from Outlaw about their renewed efforts to fix the hiss?

You know, the more I think about it, I'm beginning to think that the whole hiss issue may be more related to the basic setup of the 'building blocks' that the manufacturers have adopted in producing 'a home theatre pre/pro', than to a design flaw per se. I've read of hiss on even high priced units, and this does not make sense unless the manufacturers are being 'forced' by some convention to design the signal flow in a way that may produce 'convenience' at the expense of things like noise. Think about the tortured wank that is 'bass management'; not very elegant in my opinion, but a 'standard' none the less. The noise I actually measured on two 950s was the equavilent of 12-13 bit noise performance: I can't think of how someone could knowingly design something that bad unless they were constrained by designing to a certain 'blueprint' of signal flow. I have already established that the noise is worse when the 950 is converting audio to digital and back to analog in order to perform some DSP function. However, I do the same thing in my workstation every day, and without any audible hiss. The digital volume control maybe? They aren't inherently noisy unless very poorly designed, which I can't imagine is the case in the 950. The only culprit that I can see remaining is some non-optimum bit shifting, perhaps to acccomadate things like 'trim settings', 'bass management' and the like. Perhaps the designers have their hands tied to a certain extent by the nature of the beast.

In any event, I would love to see a schematic diagram and block diagram of the 950 to see what exactly is going on, design wise. Fat chance of that however.

Oh well, just geeky ramblings.....



[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited November 03, 2002).]