I've already noted here just how pleased I'd been with my now one year old Onkyo 706, but yesterday it got that much better.

For the benefit of others who may find themselves in the same boat, here's my story.

For the past year I'd had one device plugged into almost every available device type:
Cable/Sat - Motorola PVR (HDMI)
Game - Xbox 360 (HDMI)
DVD - Pioneer Universal for SACD/DVD-Audio (Component and 5.1 analog)
AUX - Wii (RCA using the front jacks, cable fed from below the cabinet)
VCR - VCR for the little kids old movies
CD - 5 disc player

Old school thinking led to these connection choices, and some of you may already know what I'd just discovered.

But in anticipation of (finally!) acquiring a blu-ray player, I thought that I'd need to give up my Pioneer player to make room for it. Short of swapping connections, that is.

But a careful read of the manual revealed on page 24 that there's a signal selection priority, so multiple devices of the similar nature can be plugged in at once, so long as they're using different connections, obviously.

So I moved the Wii from the Aux to the composite/RCA inputs for "GAME" and now the 360 and the Wii work perfectly, with the receiver using the signal detection to send the right video to screen and use the right audio. Cool! No more visible wires!

And, more importantly, I don't need to give up the Pioneer as the BR player will take the DVD HDMI slot. All's well. Forward I go! Can't wait to hear the "new" codecs.

It is amazing at much adapability is now being built into the avr's these days. Being able to assign separate devices to the various inputs is very handy.

Very good, Krunch. Sometimes it does pay to study the owner's manual.

Unless it’s a Denon in which case I pays to pay someone else to study it.

I have both my Xbox and “Gaming” PC sharing the same input figuring it would be easy to remember they were both there. I also like the listening mode presets for each one now that I’ve settled on what I usually want to use. I keep the music mode set to PLIIx DSX wide for most of the music outputs and have “Direct” selected for the Video outputs which took care of not having a way to toggle between them.

Yes John, it does, as it was learning about the settings that Dean mentioned about default listenting modes per device that led me back to the manual in the first place.

I'd been playing Halo Reach when I saw that the avr was in THX Game mode. Out of curiosity, switched to good old Dolby Digital, and it was much better sounding, much more full and immersive. So I set out to make that the default.