josh .. i also have heard that the 990 and 965 have a better 2 channel sound then the 950 ,,, probably improved dacs .. i am sure they are both great units .. how do you like your yamaha.. ?? i looked at the 2500 for my game room at one time .. nice features but my old yammies never had depth .. they had great mids highs and image but not throaty ,, maybe with a outboard amp you could accomplish this ..

The 990 has a more flexible bass management system in regards to selecting what crossover point you wish to use for the front, center and surrounds . The P965 is locked in at what appears to be 100hz but does offer + or - 10 db adjustment capability at that level . P965 also offers pure analog and digital output with selectable crossover freq's ranging from 40/60/80/100/120 for what appears to be the sub only . It would not surprise me if you could do a little more with the P965 bass system than what is stated in the specs .

The 950 sounds awesome with music thru the analog connections, even better in bypass mode. I guess to each his own, but i would never run a digital connection from an audio device to a preamp, and depend on the preamps dacs, a multi channel preamp's dacs are always going to be optimized for movie soundtrack info.

Ok, so after reading all of the discussions around the forum lately on universal remotes, I decided to feel my wife out on how she felt about getting one. I had absolutely no idea how unhappy she was with our current remote situation. It took her all of five seconds to say "Get one," after I told her I could program it to do everything with a button press or two. I just pulled the trigger on an open box MX-700 from bluedo.com. Here's hoping it'll be as good as I want it to be!

Travk13 I had a yamaha rxv-1000 before the 990 and only used it for the pre/pro using a Bryston 6b to push my paradigm monitor 9's in the front huge difference, that would give you the depth and throat you are looking for.

?? how much diff between using your yammie as a prepro vs the 990 .. not feature diff but Sound Quality ..

Another strange resemblance to the 990 - the Boston Acoustics AVR7120 receiver. I did a double take on the back panel image in the new HT magazine.

Have a look here and click on the back panel image link.

Notice the configuration is exactly the same as the 990, save two places: where the 990 has DVI = speaker posts and balanced outs = speaker posts.

This is a pretty popular (and apparently versatile) chassis design. Consider their $3K price for the spec and Outlaw's advantage is clear here.

Greg,

The back panel is exactly the same as the Sherwood Newcastle R-965 receiver. The CE audio industry is quite incestuous.

Judging by the manual for the Boston Acoustics receiver, it looks to be very nearly a straight re-badging of the R-965. Aside from the model name and the zone 2 remote (which is sporting a Boston logo), the manual looks just the same - indicating that the software is largely or completely unchanged. Sort of like the Atlantic Tech and Sherbourn processors that were so similar to the 950 (and even the Fosgate Audionics FAP-T1, which had a taller cabinet to support the front panel LCD monitor and the extra component input, but still used the 950 manual with very few changes). Yeah, there's a lot of interesting product development stories floating around in the background, many of which most of us never hear about.

Well, what are we to assume?

Given that the above comments are true, is the Outlaw 990, even if it is repackaged something or other, a great deal, a bad deal, or what?

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