Evening all. Gonk, this is a continuation of a previous post having to do with Oppo 981HD connections. I noticed that calibrating speaker levels using this DVD player and the AVIA disk that the results differed from the results I achieved using the 990's manual test tone (calibrating to 75dB when 990 volume set to -10 dB). So, I hooked up another DVD player through a different optical input on the 990, and the results were relatively the same as with the Oppo. Then, I re-calibrated using the auto setup on the 990, and the results were much more similar to both DVD players. Has anybody else noticed such an anomaly with the 990's manual test tones? In particular, the results from the 990's manual tones would have the center and surrounds pushed up by ~ 4 and 6 dB respectively. Incidentally Gonk, the SPL levels from the OPPO read the same via the 7.1 direct inputs as the optical digital audio. Oh, one final piece of diagnostic info. When using the manual test tones tonight, the 990 at one point stopped producing output for the front speakers. Turning the 990 on and off did correct the problem, but I'm guessing this may be related to the overall issue...

I don't have AVIA, but I may have to experiment a bit with DVE in comparison to the 990's internal test tones.

Wow, found this excerpt from June:

"There is a bug with both old and new firmware ... If the Tone Defeat is set to OFF, there is 6dB (or more?) difference between the fronts (fronts are louder) and center channel when calibrating with internal noise. If Tone Defeat is ON the unit calibrates fine.
Anyway, see if you are stepping on this bug. "

The internal noise referred to was with manual tones, so I guess I may indeed have found this same bug. Will check tone control tonight...

And I've generally been running with tone defeat set to ON, which is probably why I forgot about this.

Thanks all. It did indeed turn out to be this tone defeat bug. Makes me think that another good "forum" would be a posting site for known issues. It doesn't seem that there are many, but in this case would have saved a query to tech support. (Also, I'm not sure they are aware of it).