Gonk,

It's economy of scale. The Realta in bulk probably isn't that expensive as a chip goes (and if they had a pre-packaged HDMI 1.3 video/audio input board from a quality third party OEM vendor--as some companies do--without having to pay for R&D on their own it would lessen the costs; I bet Outlaw could work up a deal with Silicon Optix and Silicon Image to do the design for the digital input/output board for them to save on R&D as they have with Crystal semi-conductors, etc.). That's the reason for the HQV chip to lower the cost vs. performance of having basic Teranex pro-grade processing in consumer products.

Outlaw has done a lot with their 990 at the just over $1,000 price point (even giving us 8 channel balanced outputs). Add another $1,000 to $1,500 and they could do a whole lot more I'd imagine.

They could drop a lot of the antiquated analog audio/video connections (except a 5.1 analog input or two and component video) to lower the costs and put the money saved elsewhere. Drop the radio too.