1050 replacement. I found it very interesting that the sellers all claim to have the latest firmware releases and yet have "never heard" of the no audio problem.

Does this make sense to any existing owners?

Sure, some of us may have gotten the 970s with the FW updated before our purchase. I only heard about it from this forum.

I'm an owner and have heard about it from this forum, but like Animo,I have not experienced the issue. Bought mine in November 2008 and have used it just about every day since.

Thanks for the feedback and glad to hear that you have not had the problem. Since my knowledge of the 970 was limited to the postings on this board, I have no direct knowledge of the percentage of 970's that have the problem. In reading some of the posting's it appeared that sometimes a significant proportion of owners had the issue.

As a result, I been reluctant to bid on 970's, especially when seller's conveyed no knowledge of the problem or refused to respond to my question. I would be less reluctant to buy from those who acknowledged that they had heard of the problem, but either never experienced it or had it go away as the result of a firmware update.

I've had 2 970's. The first had the no audio bug, but I sent it back to Outlaw for repair and the problem was fixed. I sold that one (advised the new owner of the fix btw). I've not experienced the no audio bug on my current 970, but right now it's back with the Outlaws for a speaker hiss it's causing. There were certainly some 970's that had (have) the no audio problem and in my experience it was one 1 out of 2, but Outlaw corrected the problem in the one that had it. How many had the problem is anyone's guess.

my 970 was purchased last september from Outlaw via ebay with the current firmware on it, i have had the no audio problem, it didnt happen the first few months but it seems to happen more lately. i also noticed there is a glitch which caused a high tone high volume warble. ive since discovered that the 970's pink noise generator has a very narrow band, ridiculously so, and that it won't hold even volume between the two main channels with volume changes. a friend of mine is an electrical engineer and he has basically done most of this research on my 970 in his nerd lab. i did suspect something was wrong and asked his opinion which lead to him taking my unit for few weeks, but i am not to credit with these results for its all over my head.

so buyer beware.

Nerd Lab?!

As an electrical engineer myself, I'm insulted. Nerd Cave or Nerd Command Center are preferrable.

Serious now:
I've noticed the L-R volume difference in the pink noise on my 970. I haven't noticed this using the pink noise source on my bluray player which is what I used to do the final channel setup. I'll have to play with this more to quantify the effects.

BTW I haven't found a home theater setup disk I really like. I've tried the DVE and Avia disks and they were nice but neither allowed me to really tweak in the audio (especially the home built sub) the way I wanted.