It definitely sounds better (similar to your improvements) and it varies on every movie like you said. But I need to verify levels etc.

Fifth Element PCM 5.1 sounded damn near close to DD (@ 448 no less).

House of flying daggers (has Chineese PCM 5.1) drum dance sounded way better (if you can believe that). But when I switched to DD English it sounded worse than I recall. Not sure if it was same issue you ran into with player decoding DD (sounded dull). It's such a pain to switch back to Meridian for Decoding to compare.

Ice Age II is DTS MA (I can't switch audio on this in the movie to regular DTS, have to switch back to bitstream in setup menus).

I tested using Video Essentials HD (which is TrueHD) Levels were all around 76 (with Meridian at 87). Except LFE was off the scale (my guess is 86). I had it in Cinema with LFE Offset 0. I suspect Video Essentials didn't do LFE correctly.

PS3 is excellent how it shows stats on the screen (in the black bars so you know exactly what you are listening to).

No pops or cracks switch tracks or codecs. Did get small pop loading some discs in PS3.

SACD works in PS3 but I only have one disc that I'm not too crazy about.

- Fiddler (IMHO)

If you think listening to music is fun, try learning an instrument.
HT: G61RSL, 4x5K, 5.5KHC, 2xSC6000, Transporter, HD621, Philips BDP7501 4K, Tivo, 65" LG OLED 4K C6
Computer: Foobar2000, 5K, Mojo, HiFiMan HE1000 V2