The back panel was caved in slightly. I had hoped the damage was just cosmetic and though that wouldn't have been great, I'd have lived with it. When you power it up the display lights up for about 1/2 a second then goes off. Really sux since the unit was immaculate otherwise, didn even have any dust inside the case

Nope, fossil and I have tried a cuppla different freebie receivers he found on craigslist but so far none have worked. One of 'em was a monster Fisher receiver that was a flagship model when new but it had a blown channel, same with an old JVC receiver I had mothballed.

If I can get the right deal on a RX-V3900 I plan to get one as these are awesome A/V receivers. 140 watts at a THD level of just 0.04% is wickedly pure audio and it does some equally impressive video upconverting in addition to a ton of neat audio tricks tailored for either the audio purist or just HT music/sound reproduction

Back in the 80s I owned one of JVCs top of the line cassette decks that utilized their proprietary ANRS and Super ANRS filtering systems in lieu of Dolby and found them to be far superior to the high end decks of the day with Dolby. I was able to use standard and metal tapes to make cassettes of far better quality than the commercial tapes even when dubbin 'em off of my album collection through an old Technics turntable I was usin! Might see if you can snag one of those blah