Great, great, great news! I wanted to post this for those future knoppmyth users that decided to take the external transcoder route:

A call from Audio Authority tech support and some modeline experiments off the list finally came to fruition. It turns out my approach was all wrong. Rather than trying to achieve 1280 x 768 which is not necessarily a native Component resolution, I should have gone for a combination of 480p, 720p, and/or 1080i.

A 720p modeline brought me a rock solid picture in the immortal words of Jarod Wilson, when using the A960. The default image is off, but at least I now have something to work with.

Thanks again to the community. Couldn't have done it w/o you.

ethernut, I'll be taking your postings to heart as I would eventually like to get everything optomized. For now, I've owned this Audio Authority A960 for over two years now, and this was the first time I've ever seen it working, so I'm just going to enjoy my Mythbox for now

At least until my R5C7 download completes, LOL!