I just happened to check the Products page a minute ago to see if any of the new goodies were appearing there yet (even though the soonest any will be shipping is June) and noticed something surprising. The price on the Model 990 has been reduced from $1099 to $999. Cool, huh?

Schweet! Makes the 990 even harder to resist.

I've been see-sawing on the 990 vs. Emotiva MMC/DMC for weeks and weeks now. Trying to justify why I would spend more for the Emotivas when the 990 appears to have more features. I've even spent some time looking at higher-end Denon units instead, with their fancy Audissey EQ's and such.

Now that the 990 is $999, that makes it that much harder to decide!

Delta, I think you will like the performance of separates much more than a receiver.
$999 is a great price for a great product.

This looks like the start of a familiar pattern. Can a new HDMI pre/pro far behind?

The 950 dropped the first time in mid-2003, close to two years before the 990 arrived. True, there was a second price drop a few months before it was discontinued, but I doubt this is similar to that - the timing of this one (right after the 2007 HE Show) is too reminiscent of the 950's first drop (right after the 2003 HE Show). The 1050 also had a price drop a year or two after it was released, and it was in production for at least 18 months after that drop. It's more likely that this is an attempt to compensate for the age of the design and keep competitive in the marketplace. I'd still guess that an HDMI pre/pro with "Outlaw" on the front panel won't see the light of day before the end of the year.

When you say, 'performance', you're saying 'sound quality', right? Just making sure.

Since I have an amp (Emotiva LPA-1), and want to upgrade my 5 year old Pioneer Elite AVR, I'm naturally leaning towards dedicated pre-processors. I just want to be sure that dropping a grand will actually get me a decent sound quality improvement. All of the fancy-pants auto EQ stuff on the Denon's looks mighty cool, not to mention the DenonLink, and other features. But the point is sound quality, and that is my highest priority. That, and bass management on the analog inputs, which Outlaw reigns supreme.

I tell ya, I'm ready to just order the 990, the Emotiva MMC, and pick up a Denon 3806 at the local HT shop, compare them for a week or so, and send two of them back.

This price drop is making it even harder to resist!

I replaced a Pioneer Elite receiver from the same general vintage as yours with the 990 and a multi-channel amp. First, I connected the Pioneer to the amp and gave it a good listen thinking that the pre/pro part of the receiver would be OK so I wouldn't need to purchase the 990. There was an obvious improvement with the amp and Elite over the Elite alone but there was no "Wow" factor. When I put the 990 with the new amp I knew almost immediately the Elite receiver was going to ebay. The 990/new amp combo sounded so much better when using it for HT than the Elite alone or with the new amp. Subsequently, I've grown to really like the music reproduction via the 990 and my listening habits have switched to more music than HT.

I can't speak to the Denon but I'm pretty confident you will notice an improvement over your Elite receiver/amp combo when you use the 990 to handle the pre/pro functions. Just my 2 cents.

Gonk, I see your point. Besides, I would hope they would wait on HDMI until chip sets are available to decode of most of the new audio formats--you know the ones that are not on many disks and that cannot be read or decoded by much of anything yet.

Heh, heh... Yeah, I suspect that whatever we see from Outlaw in the way of an HDMI-based product will be v1.3 with decoding for those new formats. After all, they'll want to keep it in production for probably three years, and by the time they get half way or more into that production life there I'd hope for there to actually be a decent catalog of titles that use the new formats...

AvFan, thank you for that reply. I've been looking for someone, anyone, that might have owned a similar Pioneer AVR and moved to a 990. So from your perspective, well worth the money. That's awesome to hear. Now, if only that 990 were a quarter-inch thinner and would actually fit in my AV rack..

What avfan said. Of course trying them all is the only way to know what you prefer.

Quick thought from a marketing guy - how cool would it have been to reduce the price to 990 bucks? I'm already writing imaginary copy for their ads...;-)

That's what I thought when I saw it