I have a gold DSP a1 and like it very much but the remote is junk. I would recommend that you buy the MX 500 and borrow a DSP a1 remote to learn from. The codes with the MX 500 are its very weak area. I also ran a Home Producer 8 from All in One with my Yamaha for a long time with 2 sat receivers for pic in pic, a panasonic 32 inch, a Apex DVD, a JVC VCR with all dolby digital outputs going directly into the yamaha and the videos directly into the tv videos and pic in pic switching worked very well with the home producer as I set up a macro to not only swich the video on the tv but the audio on the DSP. Works perfectly but am slowly migrating to a MX 500 because of tivo support and a few other things. Just do not buy the Yamaha remote, it is horrible except for initially setting up the DSP's parameters. Incidently the DSP's manual is poorly written and you must be able to read between the lines and have some expertise to figure out how to set things up properly.