Psyprof1's got a good point. The R-972 receiver that Sherwood showed
at CES last month looked far from petite - in fact, it looked a whole lot like the
R-965 /
P-965 platform that Outlaw used as the basis for the Model 990. Barring a major change (which would seem highly unlikely), I'd expect to see both the R-972 and the un-announced but almost inevitable P-972 be the same 7.75" height as the 965 platform.
There's one more wrinkle in our theorizing, of course: there's nothing definitive to say that Outlaw will return to the same well for a successor to the 990.
If a 990 successor was built by Etronics
and based on the 972 platform, then we could reasonably expect the same beast of a cabinet. On the other hand, they could develop a completely separate product (either with Etronics or with some other manufacturing partner - Eastech, perhaps), at which point it's anyone's guess what the unit would look like. If balanced pre-amp outputs remain (which I'd expect to be the case, considering the presence of balanced inputs on their top-line amps), we can just about count on something at least six inches tall no matter what they do: the Anthem processors measure just under six inches tall, the Sunfire Theater Grand platform (also seen from Emotiva as the DMC-1) is right at six inches, and the balanced version of the Lexicon MC-12 is 6.75" tall (an inch shorter than the Sherwood/990).