Barely a week, and I'm afraid the love affair may not last. The 'bypass' mode on the 990 doesn't work properly if speakers are set to 'small' (which one must do to enable to high-pass filters for main speakers). So the 990 can't do a great job of acting as a single pre/pro for both stereo and theater since one can't just hit 'bypass' to skip all the bass management that most of us appreciate in home theater but many despise for 2-channel audio.

I'm really torn. The 990 sounds wonderful. The only workaround I can envision would be to use the SMS-1 and 12-volt triggers for theater inputs, set the main speakers as 'large', and keep my fingers crossed that the mains don't have any subsonic filtering when blasting a movie.

The 990 could really benefit from some more crossover options. The current setup is far too limiting, even with the SMS-1. The HP side has a bunch of options that would be well suited to smaller speakers, but really only two settings meant for large speakers - 40Hz or nothing.

And what's the story on how the low-pass actually works... forget what the manual says, because at least mine doesn't appear to do what's in print. wink Seriously though... I set my fronts to 'large' because that seems to be the only way to get the bypass mode to work well, and I can live with that. So then my subwoofer options are 'None' (which works properly), 'L/R+Sub' (which appears to work properly... hard to say as it's not well understood by this deputy), and 'LFE Only' which does NOT send a subwoofer signal to the sub, but does send a very slight noise to the sub which I can detect just by touching the woofer surround.

For most of this testing, I've had my fingers on the sub surround to make sure what I'm hearing is really what's happening. The 'LFE Only' mode clearly is nothing, but the noise isn't something I'd ever hear... just that I can confirm that it's not as quiet as the 'None' setting, so the 990 is trying to do something I guess.

In retrospect, this is all with a 2-channel analog input. Playing a DVD results in working 'LFE Only' mode, so long as I'm not in 2-channel mixdown... but that makes sense I guess.

It's so confusing. All I can say for certain is that the 990 is clearly a woman. I'm just not sure what to make of her.

- Jason