Your friend offered you some pretty sound advise. Granted, I'm probably a bit biased, since I've got a 990 sitting across the room from me right now.
Outlaw currently has a sale running on the 990, so it's an excellent time to consider one.
Through next Wednesday, the 990 is only $799 . There is also a free shipping deal on amps if you buy one with the 990. Along with that announcement, they offered some information on the next generation of processors might arrive:
The Outlaws are hard at work creating new world-class products with all the bells and whistles, but the development time line is a long one and some of the critical path items are outside of our control.
For example, as recent as late last month, we learned that the newest version of the Cirrus Logic CS49700, the DSP chip powering these new products, will have an eight-week delay in the production schedule for samples. This cascades to a greater delay in the schedule, since the samples need to be in hand before we can finalize the board layout and freeze the firmware/software. We could use the current version of the DSP chip, but we want to deliver the increased stability and lightning-fast acquisition of the latest "lossey" and "lossless" audio formats transmitted over HDMI.
Similarly, our plans also include new, advanced codecs that are not currently available in any product. Unfortunately, there is also a delay in the delivery of the final microprocessor code for some of these codecs to the chip suppliers. All of us at Outlaw are waiting for final word on how to implement them. The net result is that our new processors will not be scheduled for production until some time late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter of 2008. To bring these processors to market sooner would deprive us of offering you some hot new features and the advanced stability that depends on component-based hardware, not upgradeable software.
Basically, developing for the next generation is a messy proposition, as can be seen in the time it has taken (or is even still taking) for the big manufacturers to get new products to market. In light of the obstacles that have cropped up so far, my suspicion is that we won't see an HDMI v1.3 Outlaw product before spring of '08, and one that that
hasn't been touched on yet is whether that first product will be a 990 successor or a 970 successor. Launching both replacements at once is unlikely, so my suspicion is that one will probably end up having to follow the other, probably by at least a few months, and there's no way to know (at least right now) which will be first.