- this is fun, isn't it?

I may be misunderstanding your third item, 3no, but the two-channel sub offset doesn't require you to have a second sub - it requires to you have a sub, so that you can turn that sub down when listening to two-channel material, but it has nothing to do with two subs.

Before we get too carried away with our analogies, I was wondering something earlier this morning in relation to the root of our discussion. As I understand it, the original request here (aside from the Pronto file that started the thread) was for discrete commands for directly activating each different processing modes. Taken literally, that's at least 24 discrete commands (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital EX, Dolby Digital plus Pro Logic II-C, Dolby Digital plus Pro Logic II-M, Dolby Digital plus Pro Logic IIx-C, Dolby Digital plus Pro Logic IIx-M, Dolby Stereo, Dolby Digital plus Dolby Virtual Speaker, Pro Logic II-M, Pro Logic II-C, Pro Logic II plus Dolby VS, Pro Logic IIx-M, Pro Logic IIx-C, Pro Logic IIx plus Dolby VS, DTS, DTS ES-Matrix, DTS plus Pro Logic IIx-C, DTS plus Pro Logic IIx-M, DTS plus Dolby VS, Stereo, Stereo 5, Stereo 7, Upsample, and Stereo Bypass - and I probably missed a couple). Obviously this is technically feasible, and I can see a few scenarios relating to macros where it could be useful, but in general that seems really tedious to actually use. If Outlaw were to actually follow through with adding that many discrete codes, I think I would have to change my position on the issue - I doubt most users of the stock remote or of universal remotes that lack PC connectivity would care overly much about not being invited to the party if the party gets that complex. In my case, I'd probably end up dumping all 20+ commands into my MX-700 just for the sake of completeness, but then only map a handful of those commands to different device pages (upsample, PLIIx-M, and Stereo 7 to the CD input, for example). I do still think that I'd rather see a remote command added that would display the current surround mode on the front panel display (possibly followed by the incoming signal format while we're at it) before programming time was invested in all of those discrete codes, simply because that single command would be likely to be much more widely and easily used.