What brand of receiver what he using? While it is possible that there was a heat build-up or similar problem causing the dropouts (which may or may not have been resolved by the power conditioner), it is also possible that he has a receiver (like the 1050 and a few Onkyos released around 2000) that uses a proprietary Dolby EX decoding scheme, which will run into problems with some EX-flagged discs produced recently, and he hasn't happened across any of those discs since he added the Adcom.

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