True, 49700's in the pipeline are long overdue.

I wonder if using the 49700 in this manner (no decoding of the new formats) helped with getting the receiver into production faster? After all, it means that the processing being done is purely the familiar set of formats (DD, DTS, DTS-ES, and PCM) with just multichannel PCM mixed in (and, really, multichannel PCM's been happening inside the DSP for ages now)...