I am a new Outlaw and received my 970/7125 this weekend. I hope to be happy with these units over the long haul and I was pleasantly surprised by the quick shipping and delivery I received. I have many questions/comments about different things but I'll start by asking about larger issues.

For one, the 970 seems slow. It seems slow to sync to a signal. When I switch between a DirecTV source that is broadcasting in Dolby Digital 5.1 from one that was DD 2.0, the 970 takes several seconds to detect the 5.1 and get into 5.1 mode. I miss a second or two of audio each time.

Similarly, when the 970 is set for plyaing a DVD, and I push "play" on the DVD, the 970 misses several seconds of audio. I watched the movie _Hackers_ last night. The first thing that occurs when the disk is inserted is the MGM lion scene - and the roar. The 970 missed almost the entire lion roar. I hit "eject" and then "play" on my DVD remote to do a double take and it missed it again.

I also notice an occasional click or pop when switching sources. I can't repeat this each time but it has occurred enough in less than 1 afternoon of use to ask about it.

By contrast my previous receiver (Yamaha 995) was never this slow and never made any clicks or pops.

Has anyone heard of these sorts of things? Any ideas as to what might be done to speed up the sync of the audio processing?

Thanks a bunch and I'm glad so far to be an Outlaw.

Do you have "auto-polling" set to "on" for the input that your DirecTV receiver is connected to? If you do, it's very possible that the 970 is switching to analog and back to digital during those audio format changes. This may also be a solution to your problem on the DVD input.

Turning off polling has improved the time it takes to sync to DVDs substantially. I don't notice any delay when switching DirecTV channels.

Thanks.

Excellent - glad that helped. I assume Outlaw made "on" the default for auto polling so that people who needed it would have it available, but there have been a few reports of it giving people trouble. Unless you are using a digital cable box that doesn't convert analog channels' audio to PCM (so that the audio is available at the digital output), you probably don't need auto polling turned on. And since it is an input-level setting, you can turn it on just for any such "problem" device that needs it and leave it off for the rest of the inputs (which would be all of them, in your case).