I spent a good part of the last weekend setting up my old Technics turntable with my system so I could hear all the good old music from my LPs. I have about 600 of them and have held on to them for the last 20 years. Over the years I have resisted the urge to replace them with CDs mostly because of the cost. I used to have 2 reel to reels primarily because I could record a lot of music and play them for hours at a time wihout changing tapes or records. This weekend I realized what a fool I have been all these years. LPs have not gotten better with time but the hassles of using them are as bad as ever. Changing disks every 20-25 minutes to hear the other side is annoying, especially when the sound isn't any better than the CDs. Recording engineers back then certainly made the same mistakes with vinyl as they did with digital and it is harder to use.

As long as the Outlaw are at it they should build a new machine with 9.3 sound that uses a light sabre as a remote. It could include a set of metallic Hydrogen speaker wires and a 1000w amy powered by the sun. Of course we the could spend weeks complaining about the cost and that the FM tuner is still not very good.

Actually, premium pressings from companies like Classic Records have gotten far better than "the good old days". One primary reason for this is that the cutting engineer knows these pressings will be played on top quality equipment rather than the lowest-common-denominator stuff they used to assume was being used. As such, no compression, bass rolloff or other compromises are used. The pressings are also much quieter.

Well I was just out of warranty when the 950 stopped responding to remote commands. The unit had issues with remembering it's configuration setting which seemed to be in steady decline for many months prior to the remote issue. It was to the point that almost weekly the configuration settings would be lost and the unit would revert to factory settings. Now trying to reset all config settings with no remote is no small task. Outlaw was willing to look at the unit and estimate a repair cost. They indicated that the loss of settings was not uncommon with power dips and spikes. Anyway by this point I was not feeling up to dumping more money in a product that I felt was having reliability issues. Couple that with the fact I would be without my system for a few weeks and I decided to cut my losses and try something else. At some point I may send it in for repair but I'm not considering that at this point.

I have been reading in this forum that the successor to the 990 might have some type of "room correction". Does this mean that the SMS 1 velodyne bass system would no longer be needed?

It's hard to say anything definitively without having specs on what sort of room correction might be used. It's possible, absolutely - although I've also seen posts from a number of people using the SMS-1 in conjunction with Audyssey MultEQ room correction (allowing Audyssey to handle the speakers while leaving the sub for the SMS-1 to take care of).