Hi Again,
Some developments. Steve from Outlaw called yesterday and had me do some things like reset the 1070 to its defaults. Audio drop outs continued. Put the 1070 in various modes and drop outs continued in every mode except AM/FM or playing a CD via analog input and then in bypass.

I continued troubleshooting and taking notes as I put the 1070 in various modes. I went back to a mode in which drop outs had occured after a couple minutes playing a CD (analog input with dolby processing) and played the whole album, then another album, went to optical input and played an entire CD no problem, put in a DVD played the entire movie, went to TV and haven't had a drop out since. Weird as I didn't do anything.

My posit it this - the problem is related to outside temperature getting into or near the 90's. I know this sounds weird, but both times this happened it was hazy, hot, humid conditions here. Looking back two weeks the problem went away in the morning (cooler), came back mid-morning as outside temps got close to 90, went away for two weeks after cooler weather patterns rolled in.

Yesterday, the problems stopped at about 2:30 PM after a couple days of very high temps. What was magic about 2:30? Not sure, but according to National Weather Service data the temp here was 95 at 2 PM, but at 3 PM it was 77. Big drop back to "normal" summer temps.

My guess is that when outside temps get really high there is increased noise in either the power line or in the RCN cable signal. I live in an air conditioned house, so it's not a house internal temp problem.

I've ruled out power line noise as a problem as I've got a dedicated line for my A/V equipment from the power panel and all that equipment is plugged into a Brickwall surge protector/power line conditioner. It filters power line noise.

Next thought was perhaps power line voltage had dropped too low. But I've ruled that out as I've got my computer equipment on a battery backup with very tight voltage requirements and it didn't shift during the heat. So although I'm sure power line voltage dipped during the heat with A/C demands, it didn't dip to a level that would have caused 1070 problems.

So I'm thinking this audio drop out problem is somehow related to cable line noise that gets bad during high temp conditions. Steve told me the 1070 is very sensitive to electrical noise from things like flourescent lights, dimmers, halogen light transformers, etc. So perhaps?

Again this is a posit, but there appears to be a correlation to high outside temp. I'm not sure why noise in the cable TV line would cause me to have drop outs in DVD or CD mode though. However, my TV's power is connected via a switched outlet on the cable box so the cable box is on even when I play a DVD. Not sure if just the presence of a noisy signal at a Video 2 input would cause the drop outs in the DVD mode though. Steve wasn't sure about that one either.

Where to from here? I might try to swap out my cable box as the one I've got is several years old. In the interim I think I'll run things so that I can turn off the cable box when I'm playing a DVD. In that case if the cable line noise is causing TV audio drops, hopefull I'll be able to use the DVD player.

It's interesting that I'm back to my original thoughts that perhaps the drop outs are related to RCN's cable signal interaction with the 1070.

I'll let you know if anything changes. I was kind of surprised in this day that an electronic device is so sensitive to RF noise. Oh well.

Any thoughts out there?