And I wasn't sarcastic in my response. You said receiver, so I mentioned amplifier power.

There is a snobbish attitude among many audiophiles that high cost necessarily equates to high quality, an attitude hardly limited to audio. Yes, quality costs. The question is, how much? Some engineers overdesign to no purpose beyond satisying their egos. I heard a pair of Mark Levinson mono amps, each about the size of a small mid-range computer, too hot to touch, requiring a 220 AC line to operate, costing about $30,000 (I can't recall if that's for one or both, and rated at full power (300 watts) into .5 ohm. Who cares? (Professionals, maybe.) If you're into driving near short circuits, by it. Of course the MLs sounded good, but I doubt they would whoop a Bryston 4B-SST at @$2,500 driving any commercially available speaker system - assuming listeners weren't biased yourself by knowing to which amp they were listening and assuming levels were balanced as close to 0db as possible.

I reiterate that the Outlaw 990 should NOT be compared to other $1,000 units because of where and how it is manufactured and how it is marketed.