Update. Well, coax 2 started producing dropouts. I spoke with Steve and he gave me some things to try. Go with optical link, change players etc. Nothing helped still had intermittent dropouts. I just lived with it. Then several weeks ago a read some link here about a similar problem that was fixed by turning on an extra channel. So, I turned on a back surround and so far no dropouts. I'm still evaluatiing this. I'll keep everyone advised.

Thanks for the help.

Norman