Outlaw has kindly addressed the issues with my 970 and I will be sending it in for analysis/repair. I’ll find out what the outcome is in a few weeks.

Well, I got my 970 back from Outlaw only a couple of weeks after I shipped it to them. The turn around time was fairly quick. Unfortunately, I haven't had too much time to thoroughly test my unit enough to know if the repairs fixed the problems I was having with my 970. Within the next few weeks I will be heavily using my AV system and I will have more detailed results.

My 950 does what you guys are talking about except it does it with 5.1 analog in bypass mode. Have to toggle thru the various inputs and select stereo and then go back to the 5.1 bypass in and it will work. Was thinking about an upgrade to the 970 since my 950 is 5-6 years old. No thanks to the same bugs. Better the devil you know...