Well I'm frustrated with the network issue yet pleased overall with first impressions, I think once things are sorted out I will be happy to have some real features, so to speak, I mean the Yamaha wasn't completely lame and did diagnose that one of the rear surrounds was out of phase (bonehead installers, what you can do, the center was wired out of phase too but I figured that out myself because I had to monkey with it for some reason), can't wait to get the feature upgrade and internet music, Denon is closed at the moment so that will have to wait.
As far as the new receiver advice question, the only feature I feel I would still want was some way to combine the auto eq with tweaking by ear, that's one of the reasons I have been holding out. JohnK states that on the 3808 they are mutually incompatible, your choices are either 1) auto parametric eq, or 2) graphic eq tweak by ear. Interesting because the review of the 972 on audioholics of the October 2008 demo of the 972 stated, to paraphrase, well the auto setup sounded pretty good but of course any serious HT enthusiast would want to followup and perform additional tweaking of the settings by ear. It was not clear to me if the 997 or 972 Trinnov implementations will allow tweaking of the auto functions, but if they did that might be a nice, if not killer or must have, feature. Academic for me as it turns out due to technical difficulties I was forced to abandon the wait and the 3808 will be my processor for the foreseeable future.
