Day 2
Watched Memoirs of a Geisha on DVD. Sound was very good. My wife's unsolicited input matched my own thoughts - better power and clarity than our old receiver.

On the downside, I already experienced two 'no audio' incidents while surfing digital cable - change channels and all of a sudden there is no audio. The only way I found to get it back was to turn off the receiver and turn it on again. For now I've set that Video input's audio to "analog" thinking that this issue is some result of auto-polling or other digital-analog anomaly. This also allows us to watch all channels using the five channel stereo mode that I mentioned in my original post.