The Sherwood P-965, upon which the Outlaw 990 is closely based, now comes with a room EQ feature that includes the subwoofer. As far as I know it is the only pre-pro in this price range that includes the subwoofer in the room EQ.

I had been leaning towards the Outlaw 990 over the Sherwood because of the balanced outputs and the DVI switching. I have no need for either of those features at the present, but the flexibility for the future would be nice.

However, the new room EQ feature on the Sherwood changes the equation for me. I have a passive "raw" VMPS New Larger sub that I can only control through the pre-pro, so room EQ with sub coverage is very attractive.

The Outlaws have been hinting about some "surprises" going into the holiday season. Does anyone think there is a chance that room EQ with sub coverage will be added to the 990's feature set?

It is a possibility, but some of Outlaw's earlier comments suggested that they were interested in an EQ solution that they considered really effective - and judging from some comments when the 990 was originally released, I'm not sure the solution now being used on the P-965 met their requirements.

That was my understanding as well (that the room EQ as implemented by Sherwood wasn't up to snuff).

Cheers,

Here is an excerpt from an email that I received commenting on the Sherwood's EQ:

"SNAP is S/N's version of room EQ and auto setup and it definitely does EQ the sub specifically. I have tried it in my own room and it is the best EQ on the sub I have run across. I actually was able to take the Behringer Feedback Destroyer out of my system because the SNAP EQ did a better job."

Granted, the email was from a Sherwood dealer. :rolleyes:

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A wish from someone who has a 2.0 (= stereo) setup now but hopes to go multichannel in the next year: the capacity to memorize channel balance and EQ settings for three or more positions in the listening area - not just the full-frontal sweet spot - and either switch among them with the remote, or do a room-wide average. Such a capacity might make the 990 unique among HT processors.

Might as well dream big.

I have the Sherwood and was considering sending it in to get the SNAP but I am going to wait and see if they work out the kinks.

After reading numerous posts on AVS and other forums people seem to say that they notice little difference and that it still tends to set their speaker sizes incorrectly in the auto set up which has been an ongoing problem with these units, mine included. Generally this is not a big deal because the speaker sizes can be adjusted manually but, evidently, if you set them back you lose the SNAP settings. I don't know if they have ironed this out yet but I have not heard any new news. It is still an amazing unit and I plan on keeping mine for many moons.

I am just setting up my room and I need equalization (in addition to room treatment) to make it work. I just purchased two Behringer DEQ2496 Ultra Curve Pro equalizers. XLR cables will connect from the left, right, center and sub XLR outputs of the 990, through the equalizers and to the amp. I have two concerns:

1. The equalizers will be in the path AFTER the volume control. If I have to use analog (and by doing this equalizer connection I am doing an analog to digital to analog conversion), I would rather be doing this at line level. I think there would be less noise it the equalizer operated at line level. In the old days, with my stereo receiver, I would hook an equalizer to the pre-out and amp-in jacks. I have no way to get the analog outputs at line level unless I crank the volume up on the 990 and then add another box to act as a master volume control for all channels. Ideas anyone?

2. Wouldn't it be much better to have a digital pre-out/amp-in setup? If I could but a 7.1 toslink equalizer, and the 990 had such an connection path, that would be great. I don't think equalization of the surrounds is critical, so 4 channels would be enough. However, I would need electronics that could separate the appropriate digital channels, feed them as digital inputs to the equalizers and then recombine them to send them back to the 990 to apply volume control and send the analog to the amp.

I am going a little crazy trying to make equalization work.

Wingnut, if you set one speaker size manually, do you lose the SNAP EQ just for that speaker, or for all the speakers? I am mostly interested in using the SNAP to adjust my subwoofer. As long as the sub adjustments are preserved when I manually adjust the size settings of the other speakers, then the SNAP would still be potentially useful for me. Also, are the RCA connectors gold-plated on the Sherwood, as they are on the Outlaw 990?

MusicMan, I have a suggestion that may be too simplistic, but here it is. Have you considered inserting one of your Behringers into the tape loop on the 990? I do not know if the tape loop is before or after the surround processing in the 990. I also do not know which channels (if any) of 7.1 analog input would be sent out the tape loop to the Behringer. Doing it this way, you would lose the ability to adjust EQ separately for each channel. But at least the EQ would be done at line level. Just a thought.

With the extra channels of surround systems, processor loops are basically a thing of the past, making this sort of thing a bit tricky. I'm not familar enough with the Behringers to offer any specific suggestions, but there are a lot resources online - which you've probably already looked at...
The idea has some merit, but the logistics could be a bit tricky. You'd want to put this processing downstream of the DSP and upstream of the DACs. What digital format to you use for the output? The only way I know of to pass eight channels of PCM (the most logical choice downstream of the DD/DTS/PLIIx/etc DSP) is HDMI, although FireWire could probably pull it off as well - coaxial and optical digital output probably don't have the bandwidth.