here I am plagued with noisy controls in the Pioneer SX838 which I purchased prechildren (now they are getting married! -- I carried this unit from Harvey Electronics to my office on 53rd Street on a hot summer day). I am wondering whom else out there hasn't given thought to the following solution to the noisy and failing volume controls in these great, power receivers -- something I have mentioned before. Use the existing control to drive the input to a serial ADC and use the ADC to drive a digital pot from ADI (www.analog.com). SMT, the real estate would be about 0.3 sq inch. Any comments?