I too, share all of your frustrations and disappointments with the 970. See my last posting on the subject "970/990 signal delay" in which I posted this:

“Thinking about this issue, I look back to my semi-conductor manufacturing equipment experience where there are inherit hardware bugs that are sometimes corrected by software tweaks. Although sometimes the software tweaks do correct the hardware bugs, many times they alleviate the problem, but do not 100% fix the problem. Rather than replace the faulty hardware because it is too costly, we would tweak the software until there was a happy median. The system hardware bugs would still sporadically occur, but very infrequently. If they did, we would have a work around embedded in the software.
I'm wondering, is this what is happening to the 970?”

There were no further responses.

I'm really disillusioned with Outlaw because after running the latest firmware update on my 970 for several months now, I concluded that it is actually worse than the previous firmware revision. The reason I say this, is before the July 2, 2007 firmware update, I did experience the “no audio” bug, which still occurs, but I did not experience the new “freeze on power up” bug. Which is even more annoying since the only way to “unfreeze” the 970 is to power off via rear power switch.

But my latest concern disappoints me even more and I have yet to see any postings. Several times when I have turned on either my Denon DVD player(Toslink) or Denon CD player(Coax) along with my Outlaw 970 the audio output sounded like a scratched recorded, very garbled. It seemed as though the 970 did not fully finish processing the signal of the source and outputted garbage. Either my 970 is getting worse or the new firmware update has introduced yet another bug.

I’m definitely contacting the guys at Outlaw, but I was wondering if any one else has encounter this problem?