I haven't applied lip sync to anything yet. Haven't had to. But, It doesn't seem like something that would cut off a beginning of a track.
Either way, I've only experienced a minimal fade-in on a few tracks. Most of my music gets streamed in wirelessly now, from my PC, or from my phone using the Bluetooth module that came with my 976, which sounds great BTW.

It's easy to determine. Knowing the words that are omitted on playback, vary the Audacity stop marker so that on "play", Audacity plays back only those missing words. The acquisition time may be a lot shorter than that, but I'm not referring to that, but rather the fade-in time.

I had guestimated half a second fade-in myself. It's enough to lose the first drum hit on a lot of pop/rock music. How some people can rationalize this as trivial is beyond me. With my CDs, it's almost all of them having the issue, save for the live show recordings or concept albums like The Wall.

I think it should be a simple affair to buffer the incoming bitstream for the time it takes to identify the kind of signal, then start the playback at 100% volume from the buffered data.

My 990 never lost sync between CD tracks.

The 990 didn't have HDMI handshake to deal with. Mine also works perfectly with all manner of music.

I asked about the optical because my 975 does this with my CD player (hooked up via optical cable). Admittedly, we're probably 90% or more home theater usage vs. music so I accept it because everything else is so great. However, it's super annoying to miss the beginning of some of my favorite songs and one of the reasons I have been mulling over upgrading to the 976 is to hopefully eliminate that delay.

Yeah, but when the CD player is connected with optical or coaxial SPDIF, no HDMI is involved. This is a one-way protocol not burdened by handshake or DRM. This is a 35 years old standard, I would think that its implementation should be easy. Outlaw Ben explained to me in a private communication that this is not the case.

It has to be something with the newer protections because both my old laptop and my DVD/CD player works perfectly with my 990 without issue.

Whatever the cause, it'a an effective loss of basic functionality, imho.

Check out this post thread over at AVS. Sounds like an industry issue. Some folks found some fixes but may not work for everyone. This is a Pioneer unit.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/90-receive...ound-delay.html

However, they are using computer sources and are connected with HDMI. Me, I have a good old CD player connected with SPDIF, either optical or coaxial. If there was an option to lock the input to PCM (instead of letting it determine if it's PCM, Dolby digital or DTS), maybe that would solve the issue.