The other night I turned on a move in the same manner as always and as the movie got started i thought things sounded strange. I noticed that the front L/R Studio 20's were had no sound coming from them, however, the center channel, rears and sub all had sound coming from them.
At first i thought that maybe it was the soundtrack of the DVD so I waited for a few minutes and the sound never came. Having had the no-audio issue with a 970 prior to owning a 990, my first instinct was to shut the 990 off and turn it back on again and then replay the portion of the dvd i just watched.
Low and behold the sound in the L/R mains reappeared. Anyone had that problem before? The reason I upgraded to a 990 was because I grew tired of the random problems with the 970.
I hope this isn't a preview of things to come.

I've not heard of this problem - certainly hasn't cropped up for me since I got my 990 back in May 2005.

Yes, just once and it was about two weeks ago. However, it occurred just after I made some setup changes. I did just as you did, shut the 990 down and when I turned everything on about 10 minutes later the L & R were back with the new setting intact. I haven't had any problems since and this was the first time anything like that had happened. I'm not worried. Did you make any setup changes before this happened to you the other night?

Yeah, sometimes I have sounds redirected to the rears more than they should be. I wouldn't say that my mains are totally off, though; there's still audio coming from them and the center.

The first time I noticed it was watching a David Gilmour solo show on DVD (actually coming from my HTPC via PowerDVD). I was thinking that the guy that mixed it was terrible and that the sound sucked. I then forced it to stereo mode and it sounded better. Back to DD and it was fine.

It happens to me maybe once a month. I also sometimes get "digital noise" when using the "Upsample" mode. I know I've heard this on different sources and inputs on the 990 (both coax and optical). Not sure if I've heard it using analog (don't use analog much). That happens probably < once a month.

They only bug me in the sense that I'm not sure what's going on. Yeah, if I switch modes and then back, it goes away. But is there something else wrong that isn't as obvious, but which is still detrimental?

I had not made any changes within a week or so. And I think that I had used the DVD selction since those change, but I am not for sure.

I suppose if I loose the L & R repeatedly I'd be concerned but since it was a single event I'll attibute it to a goofy electron. I'd compare my one occurence to restarting my computer to initiate updates and changes; no big deal. I, and I think other Gunslingers, would like to know if your 990 regularly drops the L & R speakers.

Just wanted to add that I have experienced the same (or very similar) problem. I turned on my system, dialed up a DTS soundtrack, and noticed that the front L & R channels were missing. Even the white noise in channel calibration wouldn't work. After messing around with some settings and cycling the power a couple of times, the front channels came back. I'm not sure of exactly what did the trick because I was changing settings too quickly.

My 990 has not repeated the drop out of the L & R since early January.

Jeff, has your 990 done this more than once? If so, are you able to put a pattern to the problem? For example, is it just with DTS disks?

It just did it again today - that makes two times in two days. It happened when I was playing a DTS file from my Squeezebox in to the CD input. I was able to clear the problem by switching surround modes to something other than DTS and then back again.