I had guestimated half a second fade-in myself. It's enough to lose the first drum hit on a lot of pop/rock music. How some people can rationalize this as trivial is beyond me. With my CDs, it's almost all of them having the issue, save for the live show recordings or concept albums like The Wall.

I think it should be a simple affair to buffer the incoming bitstream for the time it takes to identify the kind of signal, then start the playback at 100% volume from the buffered data.

My 990 never lost sync between CD tracks.