The 997 sounds like a wonderful product, but it's way too expensive for me. Will there be a low-end version of this?

They haven't announced one yet, so there's no telling what will come to pass (when/if), but there is certainly a spot in their product line-up to support an entry-level processor comparable to the 970.

If the 990 is going to get any cheaper at the (very) last end (fire sale), this might get very tempting. I have an old Onkyo 700 series receiver. It turns out I don't miss the HDMI switching (tv has 4 inputs) except for on screen display of the receiver volume and status (big deal) so I could live without the 990's having it too. The only question is what would be missing audio wise from the 990 to the 997 (or any later generation processor). Until I go BD (still waiting for Oppo's machine to ship and BD disks to drop a bit in price) the processing options of the 990 are good enough (I think even good enough for BD as well in some compatibility mode).

And if you get OPPO's Blu-ray player, its multichannel analog output could be tied to the 990 and get you decoding of every audio format you're likely to need.

My new problem is that I now have both BR and HD-DVD players...and only one of them can be connected to the 990 via analog.

That's a problem that's going to be hard to overcome, especially since the abandonment of HD-DVD has been so significant that I don't think anyone is pursuing further development of BD/HD combo players. My solution was to use an HD-A2 that didn't have a multichannel analog output in the first place, so I just made do with the re-encoded DTS output via optical.

Yeah, well since I bought the Panasonic BD-35...I'll be doing the same thing. I wasn't thinking about the fact that the 35 didn't have analog outs. I got it for a steal though on that Sears deal that went on for a day, so I won't complain. A mistake that actually makes life easy.

- My BD30 is doing the same thing, actually - the analogs are getting used for DVD-A and SACD, at least until the BDP-83 lands...