Many moons ago, I did almost exactly what SC Jim did. On a Monday when a local Anthem dealer was closed, me and a friendly saleman(the owner's grandson) conpared the Anthem AVM-20 to the 950. As best I can remember, this system used a Denon 2800 DVD player as the source, a matching 5 channel Anthem amp as the power, and expensive JM Labs speakers. Not that it mattered, but video was a Sony 10HT projector.

For DVD movie playback, we could not tell the difference between the Anthem and the Outlaw. For digital playback of CDs, we thought that we very slightly favored the Anthem, but that might have been cost/expectations bias entering into our non-blinded, non-scientific comparison. Finally, for analog bypass playback, we both slightly preferred the Anthem.

Since this was many months ago, the 950 was one of the demo versions(I think?) and the Anthem was a version prior to the availability of the DPL2 upgrade to that unit.

We finished our comparison by sitting down and watching the rest of Star Wars: TPM using the 950.

Since then, I found that adding a Sony P9K preamp and ICBM for MC SACD and analog CD playback to the Outlaw 950, makes the combo both cheaper ($1600 vs $2500+) and sonically superior(IMO) to the Anthem for all musical and movie uses in my HT system. YMMV.

[This message has been edited by merc (edited October 04, 2002).]