I haven't heard anything yet.

Hello All,

I know it's been a while, but rest assured we are still working on this. I'll post more as soon as I have more info.

Best,

Scott

I think my 990 will be the last outlaw product I ever buy. The bass management issues are just astounding. Nothing works like advertised or even how it should work in the first place.

Is there really no resolution to this issue already? This isn't something that's difficult to reproduce, and it's really a pretty glaring problem for anyone that happens to own speakers capable of reproducing low frequencies.

The more I play with the 990, the more I'm finding that this really may not be the right pre/pro for me... and that's a huge disappointment because it sounds wonderful with 2-channel audio. But you can't easily switch back and forth to multichannel without the bass problems, at least if you happen to own 'large' speakers that you enjoy listening to alone for stereo sources.

I'll have to experiment further, but the SMS-1 may be a workaround since it has a 12-v trigger which could be used to defeat the subwoofer entirely... and then I'll just be forced to set the main speakers to 'large' and not filter them at all, even when watching movies when I wouldn't mind at least protecting them from the bottom octave.

Is there an ETA on a fix?

- Jason

I haven't kept a real close track of this problem, for the simple reason that the bug doesn't coincide with the way I use the 990. I didn't come across it when experimenting with the 3.10/3.11 update, either, but I don't know that I did much of anything with bypass mode at the time. I do know that Scott's on the case. It's possible that they're having to involve Etronics engineers in some of it, and based on what I've seen in a thread at AVS about Sherwood's new receivers (Sherwood being Etronics' "house brand") that may be time-consuming. Scott may be able to offer some further insight on this one, as he tends to be the central person for these sorts of processes, but he is probably on his way to Colorado at the moment for RMAF. Maybe next week we can find out something more.

Hi Jason,

Well, I did talk with Scott directly a few times about this issue, and he always told me that they are working on it. He was non-commital on completion dates.

I agree with you very much about the ease in which one can repeat the problem, and the annoyance that it is. Unless there is an actual bug in the chip, I would expect that it would take a firmware engineer less than a week to fix that (and a week is generous for any engineer that's already familiar with the system -- of course, that's only my opinion as a FW engineer and FW engineering manager).

Testing of the change, as well as testing of all other bass management modes, also wouldn't take that long. I did a bunch of measurements myself in my living room in a matter of hours; that's how I proved this issue to myself and to Steve (Outlaw employee at the time). Give an engineer the right bench and the right tools and they would again be able to do all the measurements within a week (again, a generous time frame, IMHO).

I think the truth is that the engineering resources are focused elsewhere. Perhaps, as gonk notes, the Etronics engineers are doing something else. Perhaps Outlaw's engineers are working on next-gen products. Perhaps there's an non-disclosure agreement with Etronics such that any-old-engineer can't work on stuff.

Or perhaps it's just a simple business decision -- not enough people care, complain or talk about it in magazines for it to make a difference to Outlaw. The same reason that the tires blew up on Ford Explorers seven years ago or so. It was simply more expensive to fix the problem than to pay out to the families of the people that died. Except that no one's died from the 990 bug.

So, those are just some reasons it might take so long... In the end, I got tired of waiting and sold my 990. I got something else that has its own little quirks, but that doesn't have the quirks that I didn't like with the 990.

While it sounds like I'm being rather negative (and I am to a certain degree), we have to keep the 990 in perspective. It's, what, $799 now? A great deal for the price!

I am leaning towards this reason. Having to go into the menu and switch the mains from small to large every time I want to listen to 2 channel is a pain. I need to know this is resolved befor I consider purchasing the next gen 990. It may be true that only a few of us are troubled by this issue and it is not important enough to address. I hope that is not the case here.

I spoke with Scott today about this. Basically he said that this isn't so much a bug as a feature. They don't believe that bypass should enable a full bandwidth signal to reach the front speakers if they're set as 'small'.

- Jason

Hmmm. That's not what the published analog bass management matrix shows:

http://www.outlawaudio.com/support/990_analog_bm.html

Notice that "Fronts SM" indicates that a "full range" signal should be sent when "bypass" is selected.

Perhaps there was some miscommunication. Every time I've spoked with Scott about this, he's said that they're working on it.

Furthermore, the high pass filter applied to the mains does not appear to be related to the crossover frequency applied in the OSD. It seems to be applied at about 100 Hz regardless of crossover setting. That, in and of itself, makes the whole discussion moot.

I think there must have been some miscommunication. Perhaps you guys were talking about digital inputs...

He certainly may have misunderstood. My experience matches yours - the HFP seems to have no bearing on the particular frequency selected as a -3dB point.

- Jason