Hey sportsound, glad to see you dropping by here. The loss of audio you describe suggests that the CD's audio bitstream is being briefly interrupted and the LMC-1 is re-acquiring the signal from scratch (with an acquisition time that's long enough to cause the first bit of audio on the next track to be lost). As iardon points out, I don't have a 970, but I've been rattling around this forum for years and have watched folks talk about both the 1070 and the 970 - the reports that I've heard indicate that the signal acquisition time is slightly slower than the 990 but noticeably faster than the 950 was. On my 950, the signal acquisition time was noticeable but not long enough to lose the start of a track except on a few discs that started playing the instant the first track started (it didn't re-acquire between tracks on any of the discs I have). Based on that, I would not expect the 970 to behave the same as your LMC-1 is.

I certainly don't know for a fact how many 970's are affected (hence the SWAG - "scientific wild ass guess" - in my previous post), but I've watched the debates of the issue and I've watched other discussions in this and other forums. That's the basis of my SWAG. Based just on the description of it, the "no audio" bug is undeniably annoying, but that actually reinforces the isolated nature of it (people that encounter it in their systems are understandably going to report it, while folks that don't may never come here to find out about it and report the absence of it in their systems).