My questions are more of a philosophical / marketing bent (although I care about all the engineering issues as well - MRC, HDMI, HDDVD/BRD):

In a time when Meridian's flagship products (specifically the 800 DVD) can be pretty easily surpased in terms of video quality, and approached in audio quality (for significantly less $$$$)...what does M see as the value proposition for the brand now? Has it changed at all given the trends in the audio/video market in the last 2 years?

I'm pretty happy (minus video quality) with the performance of my 861/800. I am not yet satisfied with the reliability of them (still have them lock up occaisonally, won't play discs, etc.). I will give kudos to M for the work they've done over the years to help me out personally in getting the machines much much better in this regard. My question is this - are they actively doing maintenance / bug fixing on these products or have they moved on to new releases only? Along these lines - any possibility of making 800 firmware upgrades available to end-users?

Try as we might, I don't get the impression (nor the personal feeling) that we have mastered how to setup and tune our M equipment. I believe this is a combination of the following: lack of information around what each setting impacts, guidance on general good practices, lack of consistent repeatability for things like MRC. There's a lot of annecdotal knowledge on this board, combined with some tests and theory. My question then, is this: Would M consider doing an an advanced user manual with siginificantly more insight into how our equipment works? (Things like common gotcha's, best practices, etc.)