I'm sure James Tanner will weigh in when he catches up from CES. As I recall, Bryston was originally sending the chips for free but then needed to recover costs and was charging something like $50. I never bothered with the last upgrade, I'm running 43E on my SP1.7 Pro. While it has a digital XLR input instead of the 2 toslink digital inputs, I still have 43D laying around (for the pro version). There are 2 chips to replace. When my friend worked at the local high end shop, I used to do virtually all of his deliveries and installs with him and he wasn't fond of HT vs. 2-channel and more of a sales person than set-up person so I did a few peoples SP1.7s. To get the chips out on the 1st one I did mine (I used a corn holder and got a kick out of going into the back room of the store after that to see the owner having a corn holder in his tool box to do upgrades). After that I bought a couple of chip extracters (much easier having the right tool for the job - one for the rectangular one and one for the square one (I can send you pictures of what the chips look like if needed). With the new digital boards of the SP-2, I'm just waiting on the HDMI issue to be finalized which James estimated in 10-12 mos. When that happens I'll pay and send my unit in to get ugraded to the equivalent of the SP-2.
