I am looking to buy a good universal remote. I have a Denon AVR 1801 receiver, Panasonic RV-31 DVD player, a digital cable box (I think Gerrold, can't remember), some kind of fairly new but cheap Sharp VCR and a Sony Wega 32FS12. All this stuff was bought in the last 6 months (except of course, the cable box which is much older).

Here's what I want to do:
On the receiver, I'd like to be able to change Audio inputs, volume, muting, and DSP and surround sound modes.
On the DVD player I want full access to the menu, playing, stopping, pausing, slow searching and frame by frame advancing, all the standard stuff.
On the TV I only want to be able to swith video inputs mainly, possibly fool with the menu (for changing screen settings).
On the VCR I want to be able to play, fastforward, rewind, skip search, and access to the menu for timer recordings.
For the digital cable box I want to be able to change channels, scroll through channels with out changing them, see the TV guide information on the shows, and full access to the digital cable menu.

I want at least some macro capability, something that would rev everything up for "VCR Mode," "DVD Mode," and "Cable Mode" so probably three macros would be sufficient. It would be nice if the remote could always have the volume control only affect the receiver in any mode. And separate on-off functionality(instead of a toggle) is a must for my macros.

The SL-9000, RM-VL900, RCA RCU 810, and RS 15-1994 are all in price range (less than $100). Which ones would you guys recommend in terms of ease of use? I would like to have as much functionality via codes as possible, but realistically I will probably have to learn some functions.

I've read some stuff in these reviews, and can't really tell which ones are better than other ones and more likely to do the job.

Thanks for any help!

-Marlon

I have experience with 2 of them, the SL-9000 and the Sony RM-VL900.

Even though the 9000 has backlighting (very cool!), it does NOT have dedicated DVD control keys. This was a major problem for me. It means you're left trying to use things like number keys to navigate your DVDs. (Then you don't have any number keys left over for your DVD.)

The 900 is pretty much a do-it-all remote. It runs macros like a champ and has enough keys to pretty much allow you to run everything with the keys just as they are labeled. (This IS a big deal. Especially if someone more than yourself is trying to use the remote.) The Sony comes with a fairly good code library and for the ones it doesn't have, it has tons of learning memory. Besides, the Sony is half the price of the 9000. All the better!

While others know far, far more than me on the remaining 2 choices, I do know that the Sony has much more learning memory than either the RCA or RS models.

Good luck!