JetJockey, see my reply to your other post ref menu and dimmer on DV79
To all other potential owners, now that I have the demo AVR300 on loan, I am prepared somewhat to wait out the problem a little longer. Quite simply apart from the niggles of the slow remote responses, immature software and poor out of box performance on my AVR300, the picture from the DV79 and the musical performance of a "proper" AVR300 is what I was expecting and dare I say, more for the amount of money I have spent.
Picture Quality when hooked up to a 50" DLP RPTV was nothing short of breathtaking using PS output, I too watched some snippets of SW trilogy and it took me right back to that silly open mouthed child many many years ago. Not one, in home film watching experience has previously managed to have that effect on me. And I haven't even used HDMI yet
Sound quality on CD from the AVR300 hooked up to a pair of 783's again leagues ahead of a similar Yamaha AX1 setup from 2 years ago, when I 1st setup my AVR300 I was using a pair of monoblocs for main speaker driving, now admittedly that particular amp has since been proved to be faulty, and I will have to wait for the monoblocs to come back from MonoX upgrade to do a like for like compare, but currently just the AVR300 and speakers is more than acceptable for decent listening sessions, so they may go up for sale ultimately, and go towards the as yet unavailable good enough Plasma to warrant upwards of 3K for my hard earned.
It is unfortunate that you have to travel such huge distances for your kit, and it can only magnify the problems you are experiencing, but rest assured like me when you see that glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, it may offset the fact that you do indeed expect better quality out of the box when spending these amounts of cash.
I can only compare and comment on the experiences I have had over the years of owning predominantly Cyrus kit and other makes of HiFi/HC equiptment, and apart from a very recent fault with a DVD8 and a RPTV, all that equiptment has been perfect out of the box and worked flawlessly under my ownership.
Dare I say, a bit more time testing every unit before shipping may have went a long way to minimising the faults and concerns expressed in these very forums. To me an AVR300 with "apparently" input bleedthrough to CD input, no working fan and ultimately failing right channel amplification would have been caught with minimal pre delivery testing prior to despatch.