Great news, the 990 has arrived at my desk. Now all I have to do is lug the thing down two flights of stairs to get it to the car. Don’t these people make anything that’s light weight? Thirty-nine pounds. I guess if you buy a 790 it will come with a free truss. I wonder, do you think they equate weight with quality? Ah well, time to make up some sort of story to tell the boss why I must leave early. :rolleyes:

Gonk – Thank you for taking the time to measure your 990 & post the depth information. The information proved very timely as I received my notification about the 990 being available shortly after noon today. I got myself on the waiting list more than 3 hours after it opened so there moving right along filling orders.

And yes I ordered the 990. No amp as I have a 7100. But I did order the package best suited for me. “990 pre-pro + deluxe shoehorn”!!

I'm glad the measurements helped out, and glad to hear that we're three hours into the reservation list.

I hope it has "Outlaw Audio" embroidered on it and a strategically-placed cowboy logo.

But where, oh, where will they put the green button?

Well, I couldn't take it any longer. My dedicated HT room is still under construction, and all of my HT gear has been boxed up since I packed it up for moving back in September! I broke down tonight and unpacked my speakers, amps, and other miscellany and set up a temporary home theater in the master bedroom. The 990 compelled me!

I'm trying to give it as thorough a workout as this arrangement will allow. So far I'm very pleased with its performance on movies. Jury is still out on music, but I have to become re-accustomed to my PSB Stratus Silver i's, as I haven't heard them in almost 3/4 of a year. I'll report back after my brain has burned in.

I've run the auto-setup, played with the "display timeout" feature which shuts off the VFD after a period of inactivity, and renamed one of my inputs for kicks. I'm using a mixture of single-ended and balanced outputs (mains+center are single-ended, by surrounds are running off of a small Carver pro amp, XLR out of the 990 to the XLR ins on the amp). I'm running S-Video out of an old DVD player, through the 990, and into a Dell LCD (hey, this is temporary..). Video quality looks as good as I would hope for this setup. I can't really practically set up my projector up there, so I can't comment much further on video quality for the time being.

So far, so good. It's not perfect. I'm hoping some of the minor imperfections will be fixed with firmware updates as time goes on, as they are mostly nit-picky user interface things. For now, though, I feel this is a great upgrade to the 950. It fixes most of the things I found frustrating on the 950, and adds some great new features. It's a killer deal for someone just getting into separates for the first time, or any of us who want to maximize price/performance.

Outlaw's really giving a lot of bang for the buck, here. Kudos to them for that.

Gonk,

Any chance to verify whether or not the 990 has fixed the digital audio signal lock issues that the 950 has? I know that Sfox7076 kind of answered in another forum, but since he had never experienced the issue he wasn't exactly sure what I was asking. I hope that you've had a chance to enjoy your new sound a little more. And I too am anxious to hear an extended review from you. Thanks.

Jeff

Just a up date on where the list is up to:

I placed my name on the wait list at 1:59 est, so that means the 2nd waive is covering up to 5 hrs out!!!!

I cant wait to get my 990/7100 combo! I was not sure if I was going to pull the trigger, but then I went to the HES and was totally impressed.

my next mission will be to up grade my speakers, as I have Infinity's(flame on, hehe), so I will be picking all your brains for advice. but I think I may be addicted to the internet only companys!

jeffdavis,

I still hear a slight signal lock delay when I first start playing a CD (over optical). It's better than the 950 used to be, but I'm still hearing a slight dropout on the first beat of the first song on a CD. This only seems to happen when I start it up from being stopped. Once it's going it seems fine.

I have my 990 set up and calibrated.

Seems nice so far. I am using Springsteen's Devil's & Dust DVD 5.1 mix to compare with my previous setup. Sounds nice and more extended on top than my previous setup (pre/pre out section of a yahama 5560 reciever), however the more extended, the more I tend to hear
compression artifacts from Dolby Digital, etc.

Also seems like I am hearing more small details of instruments than before as well.

I am impressed with the auto setup via mic, though I do wish each channel could be raised in .5 db increments- 1 db to me seems like too large a jump.

It does support 96Khz DVD's (I have a few of those precursers to DVD-A and SACD) though a few times I got dropouts. Those disks didn't benefit from upsampling though 44.1 CD sound a bit smooother through the upsampling.

Overall I;m quite happy with the build quality, sound and features for this price.

OK, I'm going to take a moment to post some findings.

I have what I think may be one of the best signal acquisition test systems around. What is it? It is the combination of our digital cable box (which conveniently provides a digital signal for all stations, even analog ones - it converts those to PCM) and my wife. With the 950, we kept the cable box's input set to analog because the delay while channel surfing drove her nuts. When the 990 went into the rack, I did a "Folger's" sort of test: replaced her analog input with a digital one. The cable box takes a moment to provide an audio signal in many cases, but we're pretty familiar with that delay from the analog output. There was no detectable extra delay with the 990's digital input - it latched on very quickly. In fact, the only comment Becca made about the cable box was that it sounded a lot better. Thumbs up there. This is not to say that the delay is absolutely 0 - as Prefect noted, you can catch the delay slightly on occasion (some CD's that start playing immediately, maybe the first note of music on a DVD menu), but it is very quick. Those of you used to the 950's delay will probably find the 990 acquisition time to be startling.

How does it sound? So far, all I can come up with is "great" - I've been very pleased with CD's using the upsampling and a digital input. My Yamaha DVD-S1500's DAC was always a close match for the 950's, and in fact I'd been using analog bypass more often than not for CD listening with the S1500. At the moment, I've just about settled on using the S1500 as a straight digital transport for CD's and relying on the 990's upsampling and DAC. Oh, and this puppy is quiet when it needs to be - seems to be a very clean analog section.

Auto setup is pretty cool. The mic has some nice weight to it, so it will hold still if set on a surface, but I used the tripod mount to locate it exactly at head height in the sweet spot.

I'll have more this weekend, but so far this thing looks like a serious winner for Outlaw.