ATI did not create Outlaw and in fact doesn't even have any ownership stake that I'm aware of - Outlaw was created by a group of individuals with a lot of industry experience (the most obvious being company president Peter Tribeman), and because they chose to operate without a factory of their own they turned to ATI to manufacture multichannel amps for them back when they came out with the Model 750. They've since used a number of different partners to provide the manufacturing support (Eastech, Etronics, and I think at least one other).

Topic, topic... Oh, yeah. The AVM20/30 is a platform that has seen a long and successful history, and I doubt Anthem will part with the platform any time soon even though they have scaled up a bit with the Statement D1 and D2. It is a very respectable piece of gear that some reports have indicated still has a slight sonic edge on the 990, but the 990 gets real close for a lot less cash. Considering the fact that neither platform is in a position to fully support the HDMI audio outputs that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be bringing a lot of attention to (whether or not the formats have much market success). True, the AVM30 may be factory-upgradeable to HDMI 1.1 at some point in the not-too-distant future, but my understanding is that it'll cost you about as much as a Model 970 to get the upgrade once it's available. I don't think either choice is bad, but for a big savings and very close performance I think the 990 is a pretty appealing choice.