Well, after 2+ years of running the 1070 with an occasional no-audio bug I connected a few more components to the 1070 and lo and behold I'm now stricken by more frequent occurences of the no-audio bug as well as occasional lock-ups. The lock-ups aren't so bad that I have to power off the receiver, if I turn off the 1070 via the remote and back on again it usually solves the problem. Sometimes, I have to switch inputs. It only ever happens when the 1070 is initally switched on with a digital source selected.

The changes I made were connecting my PC to the 1070 via a digial coax cable and changed the connection from my hd Expressvu (Echostar) satellite box to connect directly to the 1070 via digital optical rather than going to the TV via hdmi then the 1070 via optical (which resulted in the loss of 5.1 audio). Both sources have the video directly connected to my tv. I'm running the latest firmware.

Does anyone have any tips for minimizing the occurence of these bugs? I thought I read somewhere that turning on auto-detecting of inputs was a good idea. Are there any other settings I should use? I was going to play around with the inputs that I have in use (optical 1, optical 2 and coax 1) thinking that maybe optical 1/coax 1 interact with each other --- it's a longshot but easy enough to try.

As an aside, my PC sound card is capable of encoding 2-channel sources as either Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect. I must say the sound is excellent via this path, to my ears much better than any of the 2-channel to multi-channel options on the 1070 (e.g. DPLII-Music, Neo6, 5 speaker stereo). I've never been that happy with music through the digital path on the 1070 (although I find the the analog path excellent for music and the digital path excellent for movies) but I'd highly recommend purchasing a sound card with this capability for anyone who enjoys multi-channel sound from 2-channel sources. It would also be nice to see this feature on a future receiver/processor however I've only ever seen it on PC sound cards and some motherboards.

-John