Modular always sounds appealing, but history tells us that it isn't well suited to the home theater market. It's been tried by several manufacturers. In each case, it has been expensive to design, time-consuming to design, expensive to build, and frequently victim of technology changes that exceed the capability of the modular design to compensate for. The pace at which video processing and audio processing have been changing in the last four years has been so rapid that it is easy for limitations in the main board or a need to re-design the entire central DSP section (and all the associated firmware) can easily render a platform like that "obsolete" by making new modules prohibitively expensive to develop.

Besides, at some point the chassis design becomes unwieldy. The Model 990 and Onkyo 886 are both 7.75" tall. There were a lot of people who either struggled with the 990 or elected not to buy it because it was too big to fit in their furniture. You don't see many components taller than 7.5" or 8" because anything much taller than 6" is prone to being hard to fit into typical furniture or equipment racks. Increasing the height to 9" or 10" (or more) is going to turn off a lot of people, especially when the industry has just finished pushing home theater design to a single AV cable that was supposed to reduce wiring clutter and allow these things to get smaller.


It is odd, and my point is that it's odd enough that the best solution is to find an effective way to fit it into the input/output mix that the marketplace can support. Asking a manufacturer to build a one-piece solution for your specific (and very unique) case is not a practical option because you may be one of a half-dozen people in the world who might want to buy it. At that point, they'd have to charge $100,000+ (maybe a couple times that) to recoup their investment. That's why I've been trying to point you toward solutions that can work with as few extra pieces as possible and as seamless an overall interface as possible.


There is something that can function like DenonLINK: HDMI. It even carries video, too, which DenonLINK can't do.

A proprietary interface like DenonLINK is rarely a good idea. Denon could do it because they were big enough and sold enough "flagship" level gear that they could afford the R&D costs. It gave them a way to support SACD and DVD-Audio digital audio transport without waiting for industry-approved open standards (IEEE-1394 and eventually HDMI) to arrive. Meridian did something similar, and they were able to do it for the same reasons (R&D budget and equipment prices that could support the necessary investment). For standard DVD content, DenonLINK is unnecessary. For Blu-ray, the format is based around the idea of using HDMI, again making DenonLINK unnecessary.

Also, I never wanted 10 sets of 7.1 analog inputs. I suggested having one 7.1 analog input (a necessary feature) and pointed out that the ten composite inputs you described would each require a corresponding stereo analog input.


Pro Logic IIz is not an 11.x format. Pro Logic IIz adds height channels in the front, which is done either by re-tasking the rear surround channels (7.1) or adding two channels in addition to the rear surrounds (9.1).

The only processing mode I know of that can potentially achieve 11.1 is Audyssey DSX, which provides front "height" channels and side "wide" channels. You would need to combine DSX with some custom bass management (an LFE sub output and probably left/right sub outputs) to achieve 11.3 (eleven full-range channels and three discrete subwoofer channels). You can call a product "11.3" by having three sub outputs, but some would argue that it's a misnomer to do so if the three sub outputs all get the same signal. The funny thing about the products that currently support DSX is that none offer more than nine full-range channels, and quite a few only offer seven. So while in theory DSX can produce 11.1, in reality nobody has tried to bring a product to market that supports all of those channels.