This may be a long winded question so please bare with me on this one. As some of you know I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on the 990/7700 combo next week and I still have a couple of questions about the 990, as far as having questions about the 7700, it speaks for itself.

Okay, my current receiver is a Denon AVR-3805 and my DVD player is a DVD-3910. Say I insert a DVD that only has the DD 5.1 soundtrack on it. The 3805 automatically selects the best way to decode that soundtrack which in most cases is the DD+PLIIx which is what displays on the front of the 3805. It pretty much does this for all formats including sat., XBOX 360, etc. If I go into the audio options of the DVD and select the DTS soundtract, the receiver will automatically select the DTS:Neo 6 soundtract. I sure hope I'm explaining this correctly. In my opinion this is a nice feature that the receiver automatically detects the best format to use when decoding the soundtracts which the user also has the option of changing. It makes it really nice for someone like my wife because all she has to do is put a movie in and let it play, she doesn't want to have to do anything other than put a movie in, sit back and enjoy the movie.

So, with that said, does the 990 have this ability to automatically choose the best way to decode the movie soundtract. Meaning, is she put in a movie with a DD 5.1 soundtract, will the 990 default to the DD+PLIIx or is this something the user has to change. Example: say she is watching a movie one day when I'm at work which has a DD 5.1 soundtract and the reciver displays DD+PLIIx Movie. If I come home that afternoon and want to watch a movie that has a DTS sountract which has to be set threw the DVD audio options and I select DTS 5.1, will the receiver automatically switch to a DTS:(whichever format) surround format or is this something the user has to manually change by pressing the "SURR MODE" button on the front of the pre/pro or by pressing the "DOLBY" or "DTS" mode on the remote control?

Told you guys this was going to be a long winded question but any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

This is a good question. On the most basic level, a receiver or processor will always have to recognize PCM, Dolby Digital, or DTS and apply the correct decoding format. Beyond that, however, the problem becomes how to determine what additional processing (if any) is applied. There have been some receivers that have struggled with this issue (there was a generation of HK's that I don't think ever got it fixed, but were simply discontinued and a newer model released). I've always relied on my processor to remember my preferences on an input-by-input basis, as I discussed last night in this thread .

Because people have different preferences, the 990 will allow you to specify the best processing mode for each format on each input. That means that the first time you play a Dolby Digital 5.1 track on the DVD player, you can tell it that you want to do DD+PLIIx and it will apply that every time that input sees a DD 5.1 track (until you tell it otherwise). Once you have told the 990 what you like for the standard input formats, you and the rest of your family can by and large forget about the Dolby, DTS, and Stereo buttons entirely. My wife doesn't even care that they exist (except to look at me a bit funny when I first dial things in and flip through modes to get what I want).

Here's a copy from last night's post that summarizes what I have done with my 990.

• DVD, DVD-R, and HD cable are set up basically the same. Dolby Digital 5.1 sources get DD+PLIIx-Movie. Dolby Digital 2.0 and PCM stereo sources get PLIIx-Movie as well. DTS 5.1 sources get DTS+PLIIx-Movie. Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES Discrete sources both will typically force their processing modes, so those end up Dolby EX or DTS ES.
• CD sources (PCM) are played back in upsampled stereo. Since I use the a DVD player for CD's, I simply set up the CD input to use the same digital audio input (optical1) as the DVD input and told the CD input to apply upsampling to PCM; the DVD input still applies PLIIx-Movie to PCM.
• Tuner gets either stereo or 7-Stereo depending on my mood and the circumstances. Typically it's stereo.
• The rarely-used iPod input (used mainly for background music during gatherings) gets 7-Stereo.

It may take a little time during setup and the first week or two that you have the unit to stumble across all of the formats on the various inputs, but once that's done there's really no need to worry.