thanks, gonk. I will make the change tonight along with my other tweaks. And even though I felt a twinge of regret buying the Onkyo, my 950 will continue to do its amazing job because my sister is going to buy it for her basement along with my old speakers. The 950 was the best investment I ever made in HT equipment up to when my upgraditis hit. Glad it will still be making Outlaw proud of it's workmanship.

I read this and was wondering what people think?
"Personally, I consider video scaling/deinterlacing to be one of the main functions that should be performed by a digital AV prepro, in a single location in your system, along with a handful of others such as sound decoding. So in theory, the 5507 should be set to output 1080p and all the video sources should be set to output their equivalent of "native". If you configure this way, then all video scaling and deinterlacing will occur in the 5507 using its processor. It makes sense to have a single device do all the video scaling/deinterlacing rather than have 5 devices each with their own video processors. It should cost less and allow a nicer scaler in that single location. Also it should involve less setup complexity, variability in video quality, debugging issues, etc."
I have my 5507 Monitor Out set to "Source". This, in turn, lets me set my OPPO's (BDP-83 and 983H) to "through" in the source setup menu since I love the way the two players upscale to my Panny 65" plasma, creating what you talked about, the cleanest signal path using both players excellent video processors. Now the 5507 is using the Teranex HQV Reon-VX video processing with 1080p video upscaling (just repeating what's in the unit's description) so I would assume (since I'm not familiar with the Reon and haven't tried testing to see how it looks on my display, that it boils down to a matter of what looks good to you. So right now everything seems to be doing what it's supposed to do and looks great. Just wanted to throw that out for people to chew on. thanks.

I've compared the 885's Reon (same chip as the 5507 with an older implementation) to the 983H and BDP-83's ABT. I prefer the ABT a bit, but the differences are subtle.

Again, I'm no expert, but I value your opinion and many others that post here and having followed your recommendations and a few others, I quite happy with what I'm seeing (and hearing). Sometimes with a variety of ways to reach the same destination it gets too confusing for people like me with a limited amount of knowledge about these things. In a million years, I wouldn't see subtle differences with my set-up.

Certainly when the options are Reon or ABT processing, neither choice is a bad one. As for the paragraph you quoted previously, the approach described is a pretty reasonable recommendation to make when the associated hardware is not known. I think that, in your case, what you have already done is a very good approach.