As promised, here's my brief review of the 970HD:
When the unit arrived, my HT Precision Link interconnects had not yet arrived, so I used the supplied interconnect, and popped in a gold remaster CD from my Sting collection. I was reasonably impressed with unit. It has a certain 'quietness' to it that really brings the music forward, and nothing else. However, when I connected my HT interconnects a week later, the difference was significant. The improvement was more than I would have expected in overall musicality and detail, detail. The stock cable does look pretty wimpy but the size of the jump in improvement tells me that the unit is cable sensitive and responds exceedingly well to an upgrade there. Even a $50 cable would likely make a very notable improvement in my opinion.
That said the sensitivity was such that by connecting it to my P-8 it introduced a ground loop hum into my speakers, determined to be coming from by coax/cable tv. Remove the the coax from wall, hum goes away. Or remove RCA from 970HD from pre amp (while cabletv is connected back), humm goes away. So I routed the cabletv through my Monster HTS 3500 mkII power center, and it eliminated 90% of the hum. Ear has to get very close to my Zu's to be able to hear that last 5%. I might buy that high-end ground loop filter for $20 just to nip it in the bud in the future sometime.
As for reliability, it is more solid that I expected. Especially for how damn inexpensive it is. My HDMI LCD TV doesn't arrive for a couple more weeks, so I was light on being able to test many other disc formats. I can say it is indeed a nice match for the Nuforce amps and pre, at a price that is great. And nothing beats free, as Nuforce is offering with the IA-7.
