I have owned over a dozen Sony electronic products and have only had ONE issue that was fixed under warranty. So I can not confirm your claim of bad quality control.

Your last two posts seem biased and generalized. Sony is the "ONLY" company to manipulate specs? Welcome to capitalism motivated by human nature. But I digress from the thread's intention.

My next question would be...what is the "purist" way to listen to a film's original dubbing, unfiltered, uncodeced, unDSP'd, unTHX'd? Pardon me if this question is ignorant. Most movie formats are done in DolbyDigital, or DTS?? Or PCM the basic format with processing applied afterwards?

Gonk It sets distances and channel levels, much like the 990's auto setup does, but then it also applies audio processing separately to each channel (EQ, etc.) to try to compensate for room effects.

Does the processing happen "realtime" or just during set-up?