I will try to set the mains to "small" and see what happens......

Would/could you Bi-amp the mains? The center? Since I am only using 5 channels of the 9 available. Not sure that would help since the receiver is having a load issue. You would think it could handle +4.0 on the power meter. Issues started again with the new VP-160........my old VP-150v1 could handle it on my older receiver. I upgraded because I felt the sound from the center was "muted" low when watching movies.

Could it be the VP-160, even though it worked fine in stereo mode?

Thanks again....