Welcome to the saloon, drcruz. Glad to have you around.

1) My understanding is that there are some cases when the 970 starts to acquire a digital audio signal (either from changing inputs or from a change in signal format from an already-selected source) and it never kicks in. Cycling the 970 off and back on seems to be the most reliable way to get audio going again.

2) The folks that have experienced it seem to see it occur with varying degrees of regularity (although the two firmware updates developed to address it seem to have reduced the regularity and the number of affected users), but between the 1070 and 970 there are a bunch of units in the field that have not reported the problem. I'm not sure if even Outlaw has a really definitive number on this, but if I had to take a SWAG as to what percentage have been affected I'd probably put the number of affected units in the range of 1% to 3%. (That's based in part on my "squeaky wheel" theory of internet forum traffic - that theory says that folks that have questions or problems with a product are significantly more likely to appear in online forums than folks who are satisfied.)