oh yay! /s
Feeling as grumpy about AVRs as TLSguy right now. This thing has barely been used, very few working hours on the thing, and it was not exactly their entry-level at the time purchased.
It's making me appreciate the old luddite analog equipment even more...
Oh dear!
You have every reason to be grumpy. That HDMI board is on the way out. See what luck you have finding a replacement and please report back.
I just spoke to my engineer son about this.
They are in the midst of a second merger, pending Federal Trade approval, in the last year or so. They design and make a lot of chips for Apple, and the intent is to make all of them.
Anyway I gave him my rant. The problem is that these units are now so complex that the market does not justify the design and production of the chips or the boards. The honest fact is that the manufacturing industry wants these units gone for ever. According to him this will not take long to come about.
In his case, he has a 75" Sony 4 K TV sound bar with no sub and has put in a whole house Sonos system. Upstairs he has an old analog tow channel receiver now on the Sonos network connected to a pair of very nice speakers I had in production at one time. He has no interest in high quality audio otherwise.
The big problem to making DIY pre/pros is the HDMI input board. There are a few mother boards with a solitary HDMI input. The rest is doable, there is software out there for speaker set up, decoding, bass management and EQ.
So this winter I will look at the feasibility of adapting the guts of an HDMI switcher into the game.
May be this is a project members with the right skill set and education could participate in. I do have two sons who are excellent coders and one is also the engineer.
The other option is to look up my post on repurposing vintage gear.
If we do get confined to 2.0 home theater it would not be the worst thing in the world. It would be a lot better than a sound bar and a Sonos system!
The other thing is that I think there is room for a 5.1 pre/pro and just that, no streaming or add ons. In a way this issue has been created by too much consumer demand for features, and Atmos being he a big culprit.
I follow vintage Quad gear prices closely. There has always been a strong market for it but now prices are rising fast. A Quad 34 premp recently sold on eBay in the thousands of dollars. I could not believe it. It was a Far Eastern Sale.
Clones of fine vintage Quad units are starting to proliferate.
I think there is already a sense out there that unwelcome changes are coming.
I just hope high fidelity audio does not become restricted to turntables costing the price of a car, and CD players with prices out of site.
In summary it is not too soon to make plans.