Hi, I would not discount Pythagore so quickly. I just received my 990/755 combo and am experiencing something similar with regard to the perceived volume levels. Understand, I’ve just spent the first night with it and some of your suggestions make a lot of sense. But, my initial impression is that I have to run the 990 at a very high setting to get significant output from my system.

I’m not going to try and compare it to what I just replaced since; there is no comparison between a pre/pro and 200 watt/ch amp and a Yamaha receiver with 80 watt/ch.

I’ve been running the 990 at 0db to +2db to get what I would call moderately loud sound levels with the CD, phono, optical and coax inputs. That just seems awfully high to me since it tops out at +8db.

I did run the auto setup and I will go back and revisit the settings manually. But they did not seem outrageous when the auto setup ran.

Also, there seems to be a large disparity between volume levels when decoding dolby digital vs. DTS soundtracks. I was watching the opening battle on the Gladiator DVD and in dolby digital, I was running the 990 at 0db to +2db. When viewing the same sequence in DTS, I had to run the 990 at -13db and it was still significantly louder than the dolby digital soundtrack.