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!