i updated with the new firmware posted, but still my 970 has issues sometimes (unit freezes, doesn't respond to remote, and of course no audio. must flip through dolby settings) anyone else still have issues after updating with the latest firmware?

also, i'm posting this post from a mac and sometimes this forum is hard to get in too? anyone else using a mac on this forum? issues with mac and forum or is it my computer?

Like you, I would be curious to hear some feedback from 970 and 1070 users who have been running the beta firmware. The unit freezing up and being unresponsive to the remote are not issues that I've seen reported as regular occurrences by other users. Have you communicated with Outlaw regarding them? It may be that there are unusual circumstances at play.

The forum has had a few hiccups for me last night and this morning, but I haven't heard of any general-purpose problems with the site and macs. It works equally well for me with Windows and either Firefox or IE.

My 2 cents:

I have used my 970 with the firmware upgrade daily for two weeks now. I have not had the "no audio" problem when I first wake the 970 from Standby, as I had in the past, but I still get two problems that I've had all along.

First is that sometimes when I change channels on my digital cable box I still lose the audio. Sometimes changing the channel to another one and then back again will get the audio back again, sometimes that doesn't work either. It always works to switch the 970 momentarily to another input source then back to "Video 2", which is where I have the cable box connected, assigning Coax 2 for the audio. The cable box is one of those ubiquitous Motorola boxes.

Second is probably not the standard "no audio" problem, since it's not random, but happens every time I listen to a CD, for which I use an optical connection assigned to the "CD" input. Whenever I start a new CD, I have no sound until the track has played for one second or so. It's annoying because I always miss that first second, so I now routinely start the CD with the volume down, hit the button to start the track over once the 970 has picked up the digital signal, then turn the volume back up.

Finally, goomz - I also once had the problem of my 970 apparently freezing and being completely unresponsive to the remote. The problem went away when gonk reminded me that you have to hit "TNR" on the remote to get it to talk to the 970, if you've hit one of the other device buttons at the top (purposely or accidentally, which was the case for me since I don't use the remote for anything else).

Hi Bruce,

I had the same issue with the first second of audio from CD's over an optical connection.

Check the CD input and make sure "Auto-Poll" is turned off. In fact, if you have digital input only for Video 2 make sure it's off there as well.

What Auto-Poll does is automatically switch from digital to analog input if the digital signal goes away. If your sources are digital only, there's no need to use it.

When I turned Auto-Poll off, no more lost first second of music and no one second dropouts when changing channels.

Hope this helps...

TP

and
are both likely instances if signal acquisition delay - something that affects all surround processors and receivers to varying degrees when identifying the input format if a digital signal. Palmer is right that turning auto polling off will certainly help with this issue, but a delay of up to a second even without auto polling in the mix is not unheard of - the 990 has around 1/2 second of delay, and the 950 had 1.5 seconds or a bit more delay. Definitely try turning off auto polling on any sources for which you don't need it (and you'd really only need it for a source where the digital input was sometimes inactive and you needed to fall back on analog, such as older digital cable boxes), but even after that you may still notice some delay from time to time.

Gonk you're correct of course.

Turning off auto polling will not eliminate signal acquisition delay; but for a simple stereo source on a digital input, it did reduce the delay in my system to much less than 1.5 seconds.

I do still notice the signal acquisition delay on HD cable programming that's broadcast in 5.1 and it is right around 1.5 seconds.

Tony.

Any chance that some of that 1.5 seconds is actually a delay in the cable box actually outputting an audio signal, or is the 1.5 seconds separate from that delay? (Yes, I've spent far too much time analyzing audio delay and signal acquisition over the years... )

Do you know of a way I could test for that with just the 970 in my rig?

At the moment the only device I have that can decode the 5.1 DD stream from RCN cable is my 970.

BTW, my HD 'cable box' is actually my HD Tivo.

I have two cable cards from RCN installed in the Series 3 Tivo which is the only ingress for HD programming with DD5.1 audio into my system.

My other two cable boxes are SDTV Motorola units with analog stereo out only.

If there's a method you have in mind that could isolate and test for signal output from the HD Tivo box I would love to give it a go... Unfortunately I don't have access to a 990 (or another processor with known signal acquisition properties) to compare to the 970.

On my 990, I can tell when the digital input goes live again by watching the front panel display, but I don't know if that's true with the 970's front panel. You could potentially use analog audio connections and see how long it takes for the analog audio to start up and subtract the difference to find out how much delay the 970 is adding. That's only an accurate measure of the behavior if the analog output is muted for just as long as the digital output, but I would expect that to be the case since the cable box has to start decoding the Dolby Digital before it can start providing an analog signal itself.

Is "Auto-Poll" on/off feature available on 1070?